Race-ing for cybercultures : the performance of minoritarian cultural work as challenge to presumptive whiteness on the internet

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Race-ing for Cybercultures: The Performance of Minoritarian Cultural Work as Challenge to Presumptive Whiteness on the Internet

by

Christopher McGahan

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Performance Studies New York University May, 2004

Professor Jose Munoz

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UMI Number: 3127466

Copyright 2004 by McGahan, Christopher

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© Christopher McGahan All Rights Reserved, 2004

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Two of my committee members, Jose Munoz and Barbara Browning, have guided me through every stage of my time at NYU. I am truly fortunate to have found in Jose and Barbara two professors with whom the work would turn out to be such an intellectual boon. To the other committee members who have kindly consented to respond to my work, Andre Lepecki, Ann Pellegrini and Tavia Ngong'o, I owe a debt of gratitude. From the corps of former and current Performance Studies faculty I would also like to thank May Joseph, Fred Moten and Allen Weiss.

I would like to express much love and gratitude to members of my family, including Kevin McGahan and Naheed Attari, Christine and Bob Ausman, Richard McGahan, and Mary Jane McGahan. Their concern and interest about this work was more of a beacon to me than I knew how to recognize at the time. In particular I want to thank Mom and Bob for their

enormously helpful support.

Ill

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Great thanks finaily to Guta Hedewig, Shanti Piilai, Xavier Andrade, Rich Murphy, Raymond Vigil, Emma Fletcher, Ira Gold, Angelo Constantino, Oonagh Smyth and Michael Staunton, who saw to it that while I was researching and writing 1always had something to laugh about, up to and including the occasional pomposity and long-windedness in my prose style. I only wish that Raymond could still be here to keep us all laughing in his inimitable way.

IV

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ABSTRACT

In this dissertation I examine selected examples of the minoritarian cultural work in the U.S. and England that seeks to draw critica! focus to Issues and concerns related to the cultural politics of cybercultures. Cybercultures are defined here as cultural formations centering on the use of new media technologies within the context of computer mediated communication. The analysis is devoted to elucidating the ways that this cultural work contributes to reframing and reconceptualizing prevailing understandings of how racial and cultural identity intersects with and plays out through particular sites of information technology located on the Internet. The particular cultural workers whose productions are addressed are the performance and installation artists Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes, the new media arts collective Mongrel, the conceptual artist and composer Keith Obadike, and the multimedia artist Keith Piper. My thesis is that through their projects of engaging with particular information technologies and technologies attached to the Internet from minoritarian perspectives, these cultural workers succeed in demonstrating

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the degree to which the social functionings of these technologies are imbricated with racial politics in ways that often go unacknowledged by the participants in and commentators on cybercultures. In this regard,! will focus on three points in particular: first, that cybercultura! discourses and practices sometimes depend on the tacit understanding that the 'color-blind' contexts for social interaction that cyberspace anonymity provides are actually to remain within the compass of presumptive whiteness; second, that the related notion that cybercultures somehow possess the power, by enabling the formation of relatively novel forms of social collectivity, to displace historical race and ethnicity with a newly fabricated "virtual "ethnicity" is an erroneous one; and third, that tropes employed to explain the social and cultural impact of Internet-related phenomena are in certain instances racializing in their effect. Throughout the course of the dissertation, there will be an attempt to show that the cultural workers discussed here address points of intersection between various kinds of technologic undergirding the operation of I d s and issues liable to be of especial importance to minoritarian subjects in the U.S. and Europe.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

iii-iv

ABSTRACT ,

v-vi

INTRODUCTION

1

CHAPTER 1 - Re-siting Racial Politics in the Technoculture: Mongrel’s Natural Selection, The Search Engine, and Contemporary U.K. Cultural Politics

36

CHAPTER 2 - Re-casting Racial Knowledges and Cybercultural Subjectivities: Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes’s Temple of Confessions, Public Opinion Research, and the Cultural Poltics of Internet Identity Play

103

CHAPTER 3 - Re-collecting Race in a Minoritarian Frame of Reference: Keith Obadike’s Blackness for Sale, eBay and the Contested Trope of Community in Cyberspace

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CHAPTER 4 - Re-storing Racial Histories in the Cultures of Information Technology: Keith Piper’s Relocating the Remains, Database Technologies, and the Challenge to Racialized Social Surveillance

242

CONCLUSION

300

BIBLIOGRAPHY

305

Vll

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Introduction

In this dissertation I examine selected cases of the minoritarian

cultura! work in the U.S. and England that seeks to draw critica! focus to issues and concerns related to the cultural politics of cybercultures. Cybercultures are defined here as cultural formations centering on the use of new media technologies within the context of computer mediated communication. The analysis is devoted to elucidating the ways that this cultural work contributes to re-framing and re-conceptualizing prevailing understandings of how racial and cultural identity intersects with and plays out through particular sites of information technology located on the Internet. The particular cultural workers whose productions are addressed are the performance and installation artists Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes, the new media arts collective Mongrel, the conceptual artist and composer Keith Obadike, and the multimedia artist Keith Piper. My thesis is that through their projects of engaging with particular information technologies and technologies attached to the Internet from minoritarian perspectives, these cultural workers succeed in demonstrating

1

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the degree to which the social functionings of these technologies are imbricated with racial politics in ways that often go unacknowledged by the participants in and commentators on cybercultures. In this regard, I will focus on three points in particular: first, that cybercultura! discourses and practices sometimes depend on the tacit understanding that the ‘color-blind’ contexts for social interaction that cyberspace anonymity provides are actually to remain within the compass of presumptive whiteness: second, that the related notion that cybercultures somehow possess the power, by enabling the formation of relatively novel forms of social collectivity, to displace historical race and ethnicity with a newly fabricated “virtual “ethnicity”"' is an erroneous one; and third, that tropes employed to explain the social and cultural impact of Internet-related phenomena are in certain instances racializing in their effect. Throughout the course of the dissertation, there will be an attempt to show that the cultural workers discussed here consistently try to steer the publics they address in the direction of recognizing points of intersection between various kinds of technologic undergirding the operation of information and communication technologies ( I d s ) and issues liable to be of especial importance to minoritarian subjects in the U.S. and Europe, including

' Poster 2001, pp. 148-170

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“commodity racism,”^ the construction of exdusivlst or insufficiently inclusive national patrimonies, the state’s use of social surveillance to monitor the activities of targets selected on the basis of their race or ethnicity, and the strategic deployment of ‘public opinion’ by dominant political actors to foreclose democratic participation in social life and institutions of governance. The examples of cultural work chosen for analysis were selected to give attention to a range of sites of information technology, including the search engine (Mongrel), the Internet-based auction site (Obadike), the public opinion survey (Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes) and the surveillanceoriented database (Piper). In addition to being well-known, all of these sites occupy a significant though not widely enough investigated place on the landscape of contemporary information technology. The choice of these fairly wide-ranging sites also allows for some inquiry into the sometimes productive and sometimes troublesome convergences made increasingly possible via the Internet among forms of specifically aesthetic practice (performance art, conceptual art, installation art, photography) and more widely cast cultural practice (media activism, Virtual tourism,’ the collection of artifacts of popular culture). There are without doubt other examples of cultural work that could have been chosen for examination, including that of

See McClintock, pp. 207-31.

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new media artists like Shu Lea Cheang and Antonio Muntadas; the hope is that by narrowing the scope to more thoroughly address these particular sites the discussion will benefit by being better able to deal with their multidimensionality. Additionally, this will be in most cases the first time that sustained critical attention has been devoted to treating all of these works as minoritarian, Internet-based cultura! productions. Two key assumptions behind the perspective this dissertation takes have been cogently expressed by the sociologist Saskia Sassen. One is that “cyberspace is inflected by the values, cultures, power systems, and institutional orders within which it is embedded.”^ The second, which follows from the first, is that “the articulations between cyberspace and individuals whether as social, political or economic actors - are constituted in terms of mediating cultures: it is not simply a question of access and understanding how to use the hardware and software.”^ This framing of cybercultures in terms of the way that they reflect larger concerns in the realm of cultural politics is crucial to understanding the cultural work under examination here. Such cultural work attempts to provide critical frameworks for making conflicts at the level of cultural politics legible in the context of cyberspace, where, as Sassen suggests, there is a pronounced if not fully dominant

^ Sassen, p. 109 ^ Ibid.. p.109

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proclivity to overemphasize the technological dimension of cybercuitura! production. The provision of such frameworks is thus meant to appeal to cyberculture participants to give more heed to the political dimension of their involvement in these cultures. At the same time, as will be seen below, the creation of such critical optics offers an occasion for the academic commentators on cyberspace to revisit their by and large unsatisfactory attention to cybercultural politics, particularly where race and ethnicity are concerned.

The problematic: race without cyberspace, cyberspace without race

The most important scholarship on the contemporary status of race has done little to address the consequences of the development of cyberspace for their object of study. To take two salient examples, in their most recent work both Paul Gilroy and Howard Winant have had little to say about what implications the cultural work of/in cyberspace has or may have for racial identity and the politics of racialization.® This is despite the fact that one of Gilroy’s primary emphases has been on the global circulation of ideas and artifacts of Black Atlantic expressive culture, and that Winant is

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likewise interested in treating race in a global “world race system” rather than in a more limited national framework or set of frameworks. In other words, both writers have focused on looking at the way racial projects or diasporic cultural production travel and resonate outside of local or national settings, but neither one has exhibited a strong concern for how cyberspace, with its capacity for connecting up disparate elements of the cultures of globalization, has already played into or might in the future factor into such processes. The same lack of sustained focus on digital cultures is the case with David Roediger’s Transcending the Racial Past, though the author does give brief attention in the introduction, by way of a discussion about the potentially depoliticizing effects of multiculturalism, to the notorious 1993 special issue of Time magazine which on its cover featured a computer-generated, racially-composited image of a woman’s face offered as a prognostic portrait of America’s multicultural society of the future.® To the extent that someone like Gilroy has spoken of the Internet in his latest book, a text that is preponderantly concerned with issues of cultural politics and the contemporary representation of race, it has been limited to a passing reference to cyber-theorist Sherry Turkle’s work and to

®See Gilroy 2000 and Winant 2002. ®Roediger, pp. 3-26

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a brief discussion in which he seems to equate the Net with the “corporate world,” while deploring the effects of its “faceless intersubjectivity” for the “solidarity of proximity” which he tends to identify, with enormously broad strokes, as the sine qua non of “racialized countercultures.”^ Even skeptical observers of the Internet might wonder whether the presentism, according to which collective solidarity can only ever be grounded on face-to-face interaction, and the vaguely drawn reification of this account do full justice to what it represents or might represent as a technology of and for globalization. But the contention here is not that Gilroy’s skeptical take on the Internet’s actual or possible impact on contemporary vernacular cultures is entirely misplaced®, or even that cyberspace ought to be seen as pre­ eminently significant for investigations of race in the new century. It is necessary to recognize, however, that his reservation about the consequences of the Internet for vernacular cultures assumes a kind of monolithic understanding of what ‘the’ Intemet is and is in fact belied by the more nuanced view of Internet adoption within such cultures offered by ethnographic work like Miller and Slater’s study of popular use of the Internet in/around Trinidad, though these writers tend to deal with the experience of their informants more in terms of national than racial or ethnic

^ Gilroy 2000, p. 252

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identity.® Beyond that point, what needs to be stressed here is that, even if the Internet is not marked out as some kind of quintessentially important galaxy of sites for the ongoing examination of race, it would be unwise to effectively ignore the role of cyberspace in the production and dissemination of knowledge about race and racialization. The evidence already in place suggests that this role is by no means insubstantial. Scholarship on the use of the Internet by white supremacists, for example, suggests that "the relationship among time, space and form in racist culture" appears to be undergoing significant mutation in conjunction with this mode of technological engagem ent.S till more important, as this dissertation attempts to show, is that cyberspace has offered locations and occasions for minoritarian cultural workers to turn critical attention on how the more ‘mainstream’ social relations of race are mediated in significant ways within technologies often understood to be largely independent of any such role in the social reproduction of race. In studies of the cultural impact of the Internet, meanwhile, there has for the most part been little attention given to race or ethnicity other than attempts to address the extent and consequences of the so-called digital

®Gamson, for example, presents a compelling case that where queer cultures are concerned the Internet has served primarily as a vehicle of commercialization rather than one for political mobilization or significant cultural innovation. ®See Miller and Slater. Back, pp. 94-132

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divide.'''’ This gap in the scholarship has occurred despite the fact that major contributors to the literature like Castells, Turkle, Stone, and Poster have emphasized on the one hand that the contemporary reconsideration of the status of identity has been greatly facilitated by the spread of information technologies^^, and on the other that the manipulation of identity constructs by Internet users was a major feature of the online cultures of the 1990s.^'^ The role of race and ethnicity in identity formation and maintenance would seem to be of great pertinence to anyone addressing the topic of identity in this historical conjuncture, but the focus on the ongoing “informatization of bodies,” as Castells puts it, or “identity in the age of the Internet” in Turkle’s formulation, has not been extended to encompass a serious examination of how race and ethnicity factor into the revisions and transmutations of identity occurring in parallel with or in direct relation to the widespread use of technologies of information and communication. This tendency to bracket race and ethnicity in the scholarship of the Intemet, already a problem to the degree that it leads to an incomplete and insufficient analysis of cultural developments related to cyberspace, is

PIppa Norris has done important work on this topic. See Norris. See Casteils 1998. 13 , See Turkie; Stone; and Poster 2001.

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aggravated by the widespread assumption of “default whiteness”"''^ by participants in cybercultures. To the extent that netizens are inclined to presume, whether or not they are fully aware that they are making the presumption, that Internet cultures are founded on a kind of 'unmarking' of race that allows whiteness to occupy a normative position, minoritarian concerns about what shape these cultures take are liable to be backgrounded, if not left out of consideration altogether. And for their part, cyberculture analysts run the risk, when they leave such assumptions unexamined, of appearing to assent to the specious notion that by bracketing the ‘epidermal’ aspect of race, cyberspace effectively eliminates the bases for racial difference to become a significant factor bearing upon the communicative interactions taking place online.^® Even if that were true - though based on the available evidence there is absolutely no reason to believe that it is - it would still be incumbent on scholars of cybercultures to examine, as they for the most part have not yet done, what impact it has on these cultures that in many cases the participants have tended to presuppose that in cyberspace whiteness is simply the natural order of things.

The term is borrowed from a 2000 article by media scholar Tara McPherson. Bryon Burkhalter, for example, convincingly shows that this is emphatically not the case in the Usenet discussion group he surveys. See also Bailey.

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Stiil more troubling than the mass of cultural critics’ failure to interrogate the way that racial whiteness may be installed, whether overtly or tacitly, as the norm in cybercultures, the aforementioned scholars and others following in their wake have devoted effectively zero reflection in their texts to the ways that racial aversions may enter into the heuristic models taken up by the participants of cybercultures to account for the ways that these cultures work. Thus, for example, the popular chronicler of the Internet Jon Katz describes the movement of newbies, recently arrived and uninformed members, into cybercultures in the following terms: Newcomers, drawn to see what’s going on or foraging for information themselves, often enrage the established dwellers of an e-community.

They don’t know as much, ask stupid question, speak a different language. Intruders, they throw the ecological balance out of whack.^®

This way of understanding the ‘corruption’ of cybercultures by the arrival of new members is then juxtaposed to an observation by a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center to the effect that refugees driven from their home countries by famine or war often have the same effect on the “host country.” The point here is not so much that Katz or his informant are casually phobic in their representation of the refugee as somehow parasitic or otherwise inherently damaging to the social order, but instead that

16

Katz, p. 18

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despite the existence of such an explanatory schema in a text by a relatively prominent commentator on cyberspace, scholars have not chosen to look carefully at the undertones of racial antagonism - in this case of the type often arising in xenophobic, anti-immigration discourse ■- that are or at least may be at work in the conduct of notionally non-racist cybercultures. When combined with an evident willingness on the part of many scholars studying the Internet to leave unchallenged conceptions of cybercultures that render them as putatively ‘race-neutral,’ such inattentiveness to the work of racialization in this context begins to look less and less like understandable oversight and more like egregious error.

Moving towards the analysis of race in cyberspace

There have been important exceptions to the problem outlined above. Texts dealing with the impact of cybernetics and “cybemetic

discourse"^^ or the advent of the cyborg''® have done a much better job of bringing attention to the intersectionality of cultural politics and information

See Hayles. Aside from the better part of Donna Haraway's entire corpus, another especially useful text that especially deserves mentioning here is Jennifer Gonzalez's "The Appended Subject.”

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technologies, albeit without as much focus on race as this dissertation aims to show is warranted. Haraway’s pathfinding work has been crucial indeed for anyone interested in taking up a study of cybercultures, for a host of reasons. One that is especially worth drawing emphasis to in this context is her clarion call, not always heeded, to approach the “informatics of domination” in dialectical terms. She urges upon analysts of and participants in cybercultures a kind of politically aware ambivalence, so as to steer clear of the temptation to read developments in cyberspace in reassuringly reductive ways. The sum of her work makes it clear that such ambivalence need not serve as a hindrance to critical engagement with information technologies, but can instead move critics and other cultural

workers away from the tendency to collapse the frameworks for setting up and carrying out such engagements into two starkly opposed possibilities. She writes; Ambivalence towards the disrupted unities mediated by high-tech culture requires not sorting consciousness into categories of ‘clear-sighted critiques grounding a solid political epistemology’ versus ‘manipulated false consciousness', but subtle understanding of emerging pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential for changing the rules of the game.^®

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Haraway, pp. 172-3

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Importantly, this statement urges the abandonment of outmoded conceptual grids in favor of more attentive engagement with the variety of practices, as well as affects, that may acquire substantial political significance in the context of cybercultures. This critical disposition is one that the dissertation as a whole tries to keep in tune with, while at the same time trying to elucidate how the cultural workers discussed here are likewise inclined towards giving serious consideration to the “emerging pleasures,

experiences and powers” attached to the information technologies they work with and critique. Along with recognizing Haraway’s vital intellectual and methodological contribution to the work of explaining cybercultures, it is

likewise crucial to recognize the limitations of her work. One area that demands attention in this regard is her proclivity for identifying somewhat loaded examples of cyborg “agency” for the purpose of undermining assumptions about what cultural politics looks like or might be made to look like in technocultures. Pointing out, for example, that “boundary breakdowns” in science and technology between human beings, animals, and machines have been crucial for engendering the cyborg as a “condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined

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centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation,”^® Haraway concludes that “both chimpanzees and artefacts have politics, so why shouldn’t we?”^^ The rhetorical effect of Harway’s challenge to our understanding of what it means to “have politics” is to suggest that models of progressive cultural work or political action that do not venture out of narrowly drawn humanist perspectives do too little to respond to scientific discovery and technological change mediated by and within technosdentific cultures. But given the fact that Haraway seldom looks in any detailed way at how people of color have responded to these altered conditions for conceiving agency and cultural politics, we might do well to wonder whether her movement to emphasize specifically non-human types of cultural work in her analysis has the considerable drawback of diverting attention from the perhaps messier but no less crucial business of dealing with the kind of boundary breakdowns she refers to in specifically minoritarian contexts,

where to do so has distinct and sometimes distinctly troubling historical precedents. In other words, it is all very well to speak of a newly discovered “politics” of chimpanzees and artifacts qua cyborgs, but one must also recognize that taking on the cyborg {in both senses of the expression) is something that can and indeed should be understood in the fullness of its relation to the ways that minoritarian subjects have historically struggled

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Haraway 1991, p. 150

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with systematic efforts at reducing their ontological status to what Gilroy calls “infrahumanity.” Correspondingly, it seems crucial to take into account in a meaningful way the fact that minoritarian subjects of the present and past have been able to make use of the technologies that Haraway writes about (or their antecedents) in ways that critically respond to such histories of racialization, and that if this does not happen one can expect to see only a very incomplete picture of what role the figure of the cyborg might be made to play in projects of social transformation. That being said, from a feminist perspective Haraway has been highly and consistently attentive to related problems regarding the complications accompanying the deployment of information technology to non-hegemonic ends; this dissertation attempts to extend her immensely valuable work in this area to a further consideration of race and ethnicity vis a vis the meanings and implications of cyber-subjectivities. In her text, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Katherine Hayles covers some of the same conceptual ground as Haraway does in her work, while shifting emphasis somewhat from the figure of the cyborg to the notion of the posthuman, which she defines in terms of the late 20*’’ century elimination of the “essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily

21

Ibid., p.153

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existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals.”^^ The removal of such boundaries, she points out, depends on “a conception of information as a (disembodied) entity that can flow between carbon-based organic components and silicon-based electronic components to make protein and silicon operate as a single system.”^^ Hayles devotes much of the first part of her text to showing how this conception arose with the post-World War II emergence of the discipline of information studies, and follows on this genealogical account of the disembodiment of information with a consideration of what happens when this disciplinary embrace of disembodiment is taken up and treated in quasi-ontological terms as “virtuality” in certain strains of cyberculture. Rejecting what she regards as a fundamental corollary of the contemporary glorification of "the condition of virtuality” - that it represents a cultural orientation towards "perceiving information as more mobile, more important, more essential than material

forms’’^'* - Hayles gives over a large share of the latter part of her book to the work of “turning the technological determinism of bodiless information, the cyborg and the posthuman into narratives about the negotiations that took place between particular people at particular times and places” in order

“ Hayles, p.3 Ibid., p.2 Ibid., p.19

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to “replace the teleology of disembodiment with historicaliy contingent stories about contests between competing factions, contests whose outcomes were far from obvious.”^®What is important to recognize here, then, is that Hayles wants to consider virtuality in cybercultures less as a technological phenomenon that as a political and cultural one.^® In carrying out her critique of “bodiless information," Hayles looks to certain alternative perspectives, largely drawn from science fiction texts penned by people like P.K. Dick or Richard Powers, on what it would mean to ‘re-embody’ information. Though the interventions of such writers might diverge in certain ways from the problems Hayles associates with the dominant position on virtuality, Alexander Weheliye has argued that by remaining within a frame of reference centering on such material, Hayles’s work, despite her acknowledgment of the great pertinence of minoritarian (feminist and postcolonial) critiques of liberal, humanist subjectivity to the work of conceiving “posthuman” alternatives to it, “reinscribes white masculinity as the (human) point of origin from which to progress to a posthuman state.”^^ This point is an acute one; indeed, Hayles does not go so far as to pointedly consider the relevance for her argument of critical

Ibid., p.22 The edited volume called Data Made Flesh: Embodying Infomnation, which to a large extent picks up on Hayies's pursuit of the question of materiality in the cultures of virtuality, provides one good example of the utility of Hayles’s work. See Mitchell and Thurtle.

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imperatives deriving from race-based minoritarian vantages. The concern that Hayles evinces for ‘re-embodying information’ thus seems throughout the course of her exposition to edge back, however unintentionally, towards the abstract white maleness as presumptive norm that she otherwise seeks to disavow. In contrast, scholars like Sandra Harding, Chela Sandoval and Maria Fernandez have done a great deal more than Hayles to suggest how racial minoritarian perspectives, along with feminist ones, could be incorporated into the reworking of the epistemologies residing at the intersection of technology and race.^® This dissertation to some extent takes the path opened up by such theorists, but at the same time aims to deal in a more specific way with the kind of minoritarian cultural work on and in information technologies that has appeared in recent years. Some of those who have taken their lead from people like Haraway and Hayles have begun to provide substantial correctives to the research lacunae regarding race in cyberspace scholarship. The media scholar Tara McPherson, for instance, has questioned the adequacy of the optic provided by analysts like Turkle and Stone for fully comprehending the dynamics and meanings of cybercultures. While acknowledging the utility of such analysis for explicating certain kinds of dispositions towards the

Weheliye, p.23 See Harding; Sandoval; Fernandez

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symbolic use of information technologies, McPherson maintains that an overriding emphasis on identity experimentation as a component of what happens in cyberspace has the great drawback of moving attention away from other important considerations. As she puts it, the tendency in some of the more prominent texts in the critical literature of cyberspace has been to “evade questions of racial representation, suggesting that in the identity swapping realms of the cyber, one identity is the same as the next.”^® Her own work, along with that of other scholars in the field like Nakamura. Gajjala, Fernandez and Kolko, has been in large part devoted to showing the limitations of this approach.®® In an article focusing on online manifestations of nostalgia at websites celebrating the U.S. Southern Confederacy, for example, McPherson demonstrates that the cultural work occurring in these contexts is indexed in purposeful ways by the sites’ creators and visitors to offline racial and regional identities. More specifically, she suggests that the users of such sites do not so much aim to perform within ‘virtual’ and/or experimental identity constructs as to (re)affirm their already extant racial whiteness via Internet-mediated expressions of their fidelity to the ‘values’ of the Confederacy. McPherson draws from her analysis of this phenomenon the insight that the online identity work that some of her colleagues tend to associate primarily with

McPherson, p. 129

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experimentation or play has in some cases a more overtly poiitical dimension, and that this aspect of the online negotiation of identity, which in this instance obviously has much to with expressions of racial identity, deserves a great deal more focus if cybercultures are to be understood in the fullness of their complexity. That this kind of understanding might be reached, McPherson calls for “shifting our theories of cyberspace away from tropes of ‘play’, ‘multiplicity’, and ‘theater’ towards explorations of ‘citizens’, ‘politics’, and ‘publics’

This dissertation works towards heeding

McPherson’s timely call, while at the same time looking to consider how some of the performance-oriented tropes that McPherson rightly finds too limiting in their prior applications might actually be usefully employed, mutatis mutandis, in the task of moving towards a different set of focal points for cybercultural studies. Closer attention to how race matters to expressions of cyberculture can allow scholars and other culture workers not only to decisively diverge from the ‘identity laboratory’ course set down in the early literature on cyberspace, but also to look more closely at the contours of racialization in a more general sense. The tendency to bypass whiteness as a racial category that needs to be marked as such, strenuously challenged in the

® See Kolko, Nakamura and Rodman; Nakamura: Gajjala; Fernandez. Ibid., p. 129

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recent literature of ‘whiteness studies’^^, is one that, as has already been suggested above, persists in what would appear to be a greatly pervasive way in cyberspace. Based on her ethnographic research in a MUD, for instance, Kendail concludes that for many in such cybercultural environments (t)he ultimate test of whether race matters online is the ability of black people to pass unnoticed as black. This emphasizes the presumed desirability of hiding blackness and the assumption that people online are white. While the latter assumption is not unreasonable, given the current demographics of online participants, it demonstrates the extent to which anonymity cannot be classified as an absence of identity characteristics. When black participants must state that they are black in order to be identified as such, anonymity cames with it a presumptive identity of whiteness.^

The way that certain features of cyberspace might allow or encourage many of its users to remain under the “presumptive identity of whiteness” even while they are ostensibly acting anonymously, especially where acting in this way involves doing ‘identity work,’ ought to be of interest not only to

There is disagreement among scholars of race as to the viability of whiteness studies as a discipline or sub-discipline. Ware and Back find promise, despite certain conceptual and methodological problems, for the work of anti-racism in the emergence of this field of study; Wiegman, meanwhile, is skeptical of whiteness scholars' tendency to invoke white particularity as a remedy for white domination of the American social order. Se Vron and Ware, pp 1-14.; Wiegman.

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those who study cyberspace but also to anyone concerned with how racial identity is understood and embodied in any of the notionally race-neutral environments of social life. Indeed, the kind of phenomenon that Kendall is talking about, that online anonymity can have a kind of differential effect that may in many cases favor the perpetuation of one form of white privilege, is something that needs to be approached in relation to a wider complex of racial politics. This is all the more the case when would-be visionaries like Nicholas Negroponte can pontificate in quasi-ontological terms on the transformation of life via media technology while completely leaving out of consideration how the part of life having to do with race persists in manifesting in inequitably differential terms for white people and people of color, whether it is a question of “being digital” on the Internet or of being all-too-real in the more mundane quarters of the unfolding future, a future that Negroponte wholly unaccountably chooses to refer to as the dawning “post-information age.”^

Kendall, p. 210 ^ What Negroponte seems to have in mind in speaking of the so-called post­ information age is an epoch during which we will see something like the apotheosis of niche marketing, whereby the promise of information technologies to contribute to the amelioration of the conditions of life is realized via "machines* understanding individuals with the same degree of subtlety (or more than) we can expect from other human beings,” with the (paradoxical) result being that consumers will gain more control over the way goods and services are marketed to them as unique individuals (pp. 163-171). Whether Negroponte believes what he says applies to more than a handful of the population of the world, even among those in the overdeveloped countries, remains an open question. He mentions this

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Another vein of critica! discussion that has been significant for developing the argument elaborated in this dissertation has been the one devoted to Afrofuturism. Gilroy writes of the African diasporic futurologist cultural workers most often grouped under this term - people like George Clinton and Sun Ra, with their “deliberately oracular, ethically charged” sci-fi cosmologies and space alien in platforms sartorial style - as drawing upon and responding to a “compound diaspora identity where time, historicity, and historicality have been double politicized: first by resistance to white supremacy and then by the uncomfortable acceptance that [members of the African diaspora] are no longer what [they] once were and cannot rewind the tapes of [their] complex cultural life to a single knowable point of origin.”^^ This rejection of the search for origins is of course a hallmark of cyborg subjectivity as Haraway conceives it, and when combined with the refusal of white hegemony marks out an important nexus for minoritarian cultural workers to occupy, whether or not they cast their work in terms of sci-fi futurism or in specific relation to African diasporic identity or expressive culture. The claim here will be that those discussed in this dissertation have done precisely that. Almost all of the critical work that has so far been directed towards looking at the phenomenon of Afrofuturism

concern at the end of his text, only to Immediately sweep it away, In view of which it seems fair to ask whether Negroponte himself understands other human beings with any notable degree of subtlety.

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and related tendencies, however, has dealt with the innovations of musicians^® and science fiction writers?'^ Little attention has so far been given to the work of minoritarian cultural workers whoVe approached the Internet and related information technologies with a similar impulse to make use of the futurist and/or utopian resonances of such technologies to creatively and sometimes incisively intervene at the aesthetic level in contemporary struggles for social and cultural justice. The task of identifying and elucidating specifically minoritarian treatments of information technologies that invoke utopian possibilities is especially important in a context where even after the first utopian bloom of

cyberspace has wom off for the majority of Its exponents, there remains the tendency on the part of some well known commentators, like Pierre Levy, to continue to purvey a vision of cyberculture as a technologically determined and universalized realization of a specifically political kind of project with the aim of liberte, egalite, et fraternite. At the conclusion of a text published

under the title Cyberculture, Levy claims that “in the age of electronic media, equality is realized as the ability of each to transmit to everyone else; liberty is objectivized in encryption software and cross-border access to a multiplicity of virtual communities; fraternity takes the form of global

Gilroy 2000, p. 341 ^ See Rose; Weheliye; Eshun 3?c See Foster; Dery

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interconnectivity.”^® Levy tops this off by saying that "these Values’ are embodied in concrete technological systems.”^^ Against this kind of vision, according to which the actualization of politica! goals and desires having to do with social transformation depends entirely on the extent of technological penetration in the social order, the cultural workers discussed in this dissertation offer a far different assessment of what the utopian promise o f cyberspace looks like for those with no illusions about the ways that science and technology have often been made to work throughout the course of modernity in the service of racialization and social exclusion. Against the tendency a la Levy to ignore location as a fundamental aspect of the cultural work attaching to the “concrete technological systems” he haloes, people like Gomez Pena and the Mongrel collective emphasize that their approach to trucking with cyberspace utopianism, like the work of their Afrofuturist precursors, proceeds from a self-consciously minoritarian orientation to question the social and cultural grounds on which such technological systems are engendered, developed, and put to use. Their work thus helps to critically re-frame the theme of utopia so important to the cultural development of the Internet.

Levy, p. 230 Ibid., p. 230

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Even among scholars who’ve shown far more restraint than Levy in their claims about cyberspace and its cultural implications, there is yet the prevalent tendency to treat the object of study without enough attention to the particularities of context and agency. Lev Manovich's book on new media aestethics, for example, has been taken to task for its undue formalism by fellow media theorist Marsha Kinder. Kinder points out that “Manovich establishes a formal rhetoric of new media without addressing cultural differences among players and practices.”^ Feminist scholars, along with others like Slater and Miller and Sobchack, have likewise called for moving away from discussing the Internet or information technologies in terms that flatten out the differences among the various players and practices therein. Where analysts have chosen to deal more specifically with relatively discrete Internet subcultures, as in Jenkins’s work on fandom or Thomas’s study of hackers, opportunities for carefully investigating the status of race or ethnicity as it has borne upon the ways that participants in these subcultures operate have been largely missed. Thomas, for example, delivers a discussion of hacker cultures that is refreshingly serious and scholarly, but that despite being illuminating on a number of matters ultimately shies away from carefully looking at the status of racial identity in these cultures, even though at one point he offers the finding that “the boy

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Kinder, p. 120

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culture element of the hacker underground has always been (and continues to be) rife with racism.”'*’’ This kind of opting out of an analysis of race in a prominent strain of cybercuiture (however minor it may be in terms of the number of actual participants) is significant because even if race and ethnicity are not seen to be the foremost among the salient factors for analysis vis a vis these subcultures, there nevertheless remains the problem of accounting for how working within an unexamined framework of ‘racial knowledge’ — or as Thomas suggests, racist worldviews — might serve to substantially deform the self-avowed subversive orientation of these cultures toward the elements of the wider culture to which they so emphatically declare their objection. But Thomas is, again, by no means the only one not to address such a question about the impact of racialization in Internet cultures. To reiterate, the scholarship of cybercultures has failed on the whole to deal sufficiently with how whiteness makes a difference to the cultural life of the Internet. With regard to Intemet sub-cultures, this presents the particular problem of not allowing the observer to know in any comprehensive sense exactly how

those involved in such cultures understand the insertion of their collective cyberspace activities into larger currents in cultural work and social life, including those having to do with racial identity and racial politics.

See Thomas.

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The expansion of the study of cybercultures beyond a focus on identity experimentation; the Interrogation of the unmarked status of whiteness as it has extended into cyberspace; the examination of assumptions about who is the ‘proper’ subject of information technologies; the determination that cyberspace is better approached at the level of its various local contexts and phenomena than with a view to presenting vast, ungrounded syntheses regarding its content or dynamics; and the consideration of the ways in which cultural work deriving from minoritarian perspectives has attempted to address (what is often seen as) the utopian dimension of certain information technologies — these, then, are the concerns that have guided the scholarship presented here. These themes have variously been given enlightening consideration in a number of the texts referred to above, but have so far yet to be treated in conjunction each with the others. Still more to the point, these themes have yet to be taken up in any kind of extended way in relation to minoritarian cultural work on (in both senses of the word) the Internet. The remedying of the absence of this variety of scholarly intervention should be of particular significance not only to those scholars working on new media, but also to anyone connected to the field of performance studies, for It should be clear to anyone so concerned that performances addressing racial and ethnic identity have been very important for scholars

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responding to and theorizing around recent developments in live art and related forms of aesthetic production. Such scholarship has convincingly stressed the notion that for much of the significant work carried out in recent years in the area of live art, interrogatory treatments of minoritarian identity and innovatory approaches to performance have been intertwined and interdependent features. Work on performance art'*^ has in particular done much to allow for an understanding of how performance has been used by minoritarian artists to critique the limits of art world inclusivity in the U.S.

and Europe and to explore new expressive routes towards the constitution of political cultures via which can emerge “alternative styles of political behavior and alternative norms of public s p e e c h . T h i s dissertation follows on and adds to this part of the performance studies literature by examining how certain minoritarian cultural work of the 1990s and early 2000s imports this manner of approaching performance into cyberspace, where issues pertaining to the composition of alternative public spheres have taken on even greater purchase in recent years.

Chapter Summaries Natural Selection, the new media art collective Mongrel’s mock Internet search tool project, is the focus of the first chapter. The piece works

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See, inter alia, A, Jones; Munoz, and Fusco 2001b

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by hacking into a commercial Internet search directory and redesigning its search protocols so that any user entering a racial epithet as a search term finds himself directed towards a network of anti-racist sites fashioned by Mongrel and its collaborators for this project. My reading of Natural Selection involves seeing it as a critical commentary on the

Instrumentalization’ of the search directory or engine, according to which this technology is seen strictly as a neutral tool for information retrieval rather than as a technology that via its reificatory effects plays a role in the social reproduction of race and racialization. Mongrel’s work, I try to show, is devoted to helping the user to recognize that the logic governing the function of search technologies is not valence-free but is in fact rooted in racialized epistemologies. Joined with this examination of Mongrel’s critique of the search engine, there is also in the chapter an elucidation of the ways that their project intervenes into debates around multiculturalism and national identity in the U.K. In particular, I demonstrate how Mongrel’s work plays off and challenges New Labour’s attempt to install cybercultural tropes like fluidity, mobility and recombinant identity as universal reference points for its national re-branding enterprise, while doing little to acknowledge the ways in which class and race mediate access to

Fraser, p. 8

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representation within the space of national identity, both in historical terms and in the Cool Britannia of the present. The second chapter looks at Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes’s net art/performance/installation project known as Temple of Confessions. The work uses both live performance and an internet-based parody of a public opinion survey to invite reflection on how and with what consequences racial and ethnic identity is typically understood to have no bearing on the composition and operation of information technologies. Both the performance and the survey confront the ‘user’ with self-consciously provocative and/or stereotyped representations of Mexican and Chicano identity as something like the flip side of the freely elective, and often racially unmarked, identity play associated with the MUD, a key cybercultural milieu. By doing as much Gomez Pena and Sifuentes allow both their gallery and cyberspace audiences - the ‘confessants’ - to index the ongoing vicissitudes of racialization for Latinos, among others, against the glorification of identity experimentation as a feature of cybercultures that

has gone on in much of the popular and scholarly discourse on the Internet. At the same time, Temple attempts to critique and to some extent re­ purpose the opinion survey so as to strategically (and perhaps paradoxically) fashion this technology into a venue for examining how the hegemonic construction of U.S. ‘public opinion’ serves to produce and

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condition racialized subjectivities by effectively limiting the range, via a constant though unavowed reliance on whiteness as norm, of which ‘publics” and which ‘opinions’ are deemed to be worth taking into account. The third chapter offers a discussion of Keith Obadike’s Blackness for Sale, a Conceptual/net art piece in which Obadike, an African-American artist, put up his blackness for sale on eB a y.! explain this work as both a critical commentary on the cultural politics of collecting artifacts of so-called

Black Americana and a call to interrogate some of the assumptions regarding the status of community in cyberspace. To contextualize Obadike’s work, a section of the chapter deals with how eBay’s emergence as a prominent instance of cybercultural community may be related to the auction site’s ambiguous bracketing of race as a component of its brand of community. I posit Blackness for Sale as a timely and important response to eBay’s attempt to position itself as a race-blind forum for internet entrepeneurship and consumerism while at the same time expediently benefiting from, and doing little in the way of anything substantive to discourage, the sale of certain kinds of racist artifacts at the site. My reading of Obadike’s work also recognizes that his critique of eBay’s allegedly ‘nonraciai’ libertarian approach to community dovetails with the ongoing critical inquiry into the status of black cultural identity. In line with some of the recent literature addressing the cultural value of blackness in

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the U .S ,,! maintain, Obadike’s piece works to find a productive basis for understanding contemporary developments in biack cultural identity, including those related to the status of community vis a vis the cultures of cyberspace and/or globalization. The final site investigated here is the black British artist Keith Piper’s Relocating the Remains, a gallery installation, CD-ROM and net art project

devoted to calling attention to the fraught role of database technologies as they have been applied to some of modernity’s most pernicious racial projects. Through a rich, albeit somewhat associative, hyperlinked layering of visual icons of 19“^and 20th century eugenics or contemporary immigration-related surveillance practices, Piper endeavors to move his gallery or Intemet-based audience to recognize the extent to which the logics of the archive and of the disciplining of the minoritarian subject have been made to converge throughout the course the last two centuries. Piper’s own process of using information technology to “relocate” these histories and make them available for critical examination is read as a significant contribution to Afrofuturism, which as is explained above is the strain of cultural production oriented towards treating African diasporic themes and concerns of the present by refracting them through a critical engagement with the technocultural figuration of a “prosthetically enhanced

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future.”^ Relocating the Remains implicitly asks how it might be possible to move the hollow, still very undemocratic utopianism upon which so much of the technoculture has been premised towards a reckoning with information technologies that takes into account some of the political and epistemological lessons to be derived from the use of archiving technologies in projects of ethnoracial oppression and resistance.

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See Dery, p. 180

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Chapter 1 - Re-siting Racial Politics in the Techoculture: Mongrels’ Natural Selection, the Search Engine and Contemporary British Cultural Politics

In the early part of 1998, an important moment In United Kingdom cultural politics occurred when the powerhouse:uk exhibition was staged in London. Something of a prelude to the disastrous Millennium Dome project that would ensue in the following years, the show was one of the various initiatives advanced by the Labour Government as part of its “Cool Britannia” campaign to re-fashion the nation’s image.'' Presented in a temporary site in Horse Guards Parade and sponsored by the Department of Trade and Industry, the exhibit was meant to showcase “British creativity” for the attendees of the Euro-Asian summit meeting in London that year, endeavoring to purvey both the impression of Britain’s singular currency in cultural production and an anodyne image of the nation’s multiculture so as to help attract international clients to the U.K. creative industries. The ‘Changing of the Guard’ reference (this ceremony is famously performed

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every day in Horse Guards Parade) may or may not have been accidental, but certainly in symbolic terms Labour wished to use the exhibit to showcase not only British culture but also its own cultural policy. The aim of this policy, as Angela McRobbie has pointed out, has been among other things to “re-define culture and the arts away from their more traditional image as recipients of funding towards a more aggressively promotional

and entrepreneurial ethos.”^ Thus in the four sections of the exhibit, devoted alternately to lifestyle, communication, networking and learning, the visitor to this elaborate display of ‘Creative Britain’ was invited to see, as Trade and Industry minister John Battle said in publicizing the event, “an example of Britain 'setting out its stall better’.” Battle went on to add that Britain has been “a creative nation in the past throughout the whole of the Industrial Revolution and well into the 20‘^ century. But sometimes [it does] not shout about it enough.”® The shouting, in this case, was focused on the work of people and organizations like the fashion designers Alexander McQueen and Paul Smith, the household design chain Habitat, and the ‘creative media network’ known as SohoNet. Beyond these showpieces, there was a more general attempt to summon up something like a structure of feeling in the

^ For a comprehensive account of the fiasco, go to www.guardian.co.uk/dome. ^ McRobbie. p.4

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!ate 1990s culture society, with a decided emphasis on the role of new media technologies and technoioglcal practices in putativeiy facilitating both social harmony and cultural innovation. Rather, however, than offering any especially persuasive examples of how information technology has played or might play such a major role in the lives of those not directly involved in, say, film production or advertising, the networking section concentrated on framing the intersection of technology and culture under vaguely multiculturalist slogans like ‘dream in colour’, ‘mesh’, and ‘symbiosis'. The lifestyle section, meanwhile, offered a "concoction of rave culture, music, fashion and food, punctuated with flashes of text - ‘community’, ‘unity’, ‘connect’” - while appearing to one critical observer to be “always careful and knowing in its inclusion of black and brown skins.”^ The overall effect of the exhibit appears to have been to portray culture as centered principally around two axes: “to uplift people’s hearts and at the same time to draw in a major economic return to the country.”®There is little room in this treatment of culture either for addressing the thorny questions of aesthetics and value

^ Qtd. in BBC,

http.://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report//1998/04/98/powerhouse/72853.stm ^ See Haskel. ®Smith, qtd. in Bewes, p.31; this quote comes originally from then Minister for Culture, Media and Sport Chris Smith’s text Creative Britain. Smith's department, now headed by Tessa Jowell, was renamed by Labour when it came into power in 1997, having previously been called the Department of National Heritage.

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in the confiict-riven multicuitural societies of the presenf or for pursuing “appreciation of ‘cultural’ products... without affirmation of the particular dispensation that evaluates the good entirely according to success in the market.’’^ In January, 1999, the England-based new media arts collective Mongrel introduced their mock search engine/directory project to the World

Wide Web. Natural Selection operated as an appropriation of a commercial search directory (which would appear to be Yahoo, though for obvious reasons the members of Mongrel tend not to name it as such in their commentaries on the project) modified to lead any user entering a racial epithet as a search term into one of its small network of anti-racist sites. When the project was taken online, the group, which consists of the three core members Graham Harwood, Matsuko Yokokoji, and Richard Pierre Davis, had been working together in various forms for the previous four years. Harwood and Davis had met at Artec (The Arts Technology Centre) in London in 1995, and after some initial collaboration on other projects decided that they wished to carry out a project addressing racism in the context of the Internet In 1997, Mongrel was formed by Harwood, Yokokoji (who is married to Harwood), and Davis, with Mervin Jarman, another Artec

®Guillory, pp. 269-340

^ Bewes, p.31 39

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attendee, joining sometime later. Harwood and Matthew Fuller, a new media artist and theoris*^ “^ad already worked for some time on what was to become Natural S e le c tio n and at that point the other members of Mongrel joined their efforts. Other cultural workers were recruited to contribute materia! for the web sites, ten in all, that would represent Natural Selection’s alternative network. (Further biographical Information about the members of the group can be located at their web site, WWW.

mongrel.ora.ukf. Within a year of the opening of the powerhouse:uk

exhibition, the project would appear on the Web, offering a radically divergent perspective on the politics of U.K. multiculturalism from anything on view in the Cool Britannia image inventory. Among the sites that Mongrel included in its Natural Selection network are a mock porn venue purveying a “racially-motivated fuckfantasia”; the writer Stewart Home’s Web-based detournement, by way of gangsta rap and gay porn dialogue and images, of recontextualized excerpts from white supremacist punk rock songs (among other emblems of racist culture); and a site offering Richard-Pierre Davis’s parody of a Space Invaders-type video game in which an icon representing a black man is forced to try to shoot down a series of assailants in the form of police and racist skinheads. Each of the ten sites, which also can be accessed by clicking on ‘Hot Search’ link categories like Travel, White Goods, Science

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and so forth, pointedly draws upon frames of reference familiar from contemporary cultures of the Internet (porn sites, MP3 download sites, game sites) while injecting into these readily discernible contexts an unexpected commentary on the racial politics of the 1990s culture society. This commentary is oriented towards inviting denizens of cybercultures especially those who are white - to re-examine some of the cardinal assumptions related to how and in whose interest these cultures are organized. More specifically, employing the search engine in a way that serves to divert the user into its network allows Mongrel to put into question the tropes of fluidity, mobility and recombinant identity that have occupied such a central place in both the discourse of cybercultures and the representation of the national culture that an exhibit like powerhouse:uk sets forth. In Natural Selection, Web surfing becomes not simply about availing oneself of the resources of the Internet according to the unexamined logic of unfettered connexity; instead, when encountering Mongrel’s alternative network the would-be Web surfer is brought face to interface with some of the various race-related factors acting to limit the universal accessibility and viability of work and lifestyle flexibility, geographic and technological mobilities, and identity play as features of cultural work and cultural identity both in cyberspace and in the wider

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(techno)culture society.® Where something like powerhouse:uk is concerned, it is evident that the version of ‘ British creativity’ vis a vis the multiculture outlined in the exhibition depends on the notion that the development and popular use of information technology allows not only for the expansion of the reach of certain types of cultural innovation, but also for an opportunity to reinvent, or at least repackage, the national culture in line with the ideological work performed by cybercultural tropes like fluidity, mobility and recombinacy. Mongrel resists the movement to uncritically adopt these powerful metaphors as ethical and political bases for grounding the work of cybercultures and the ongoing efforts at remaking British culture. The above characterization of the cultural work performed at the Natural Selection sites as anti-racist is meant to indicate that this work appears to self-consciously pose itself, sometimes explicitly but sometimes in a more oracular fashion, against various types of racist or racializing discourse and/or practices. The organizers of the project have been at pains, however, to distance themselves from identifying their work with conventional forms of ‘anti-racism’ to the degree that these are taken to offer, in the words of one of the organizers, “a nice neat ‘anti-racist’ or

®The term "technological mobilities" is used by urbanist Stephen Graham to refer to city dwellers' unequally distributed access to information, energy, and

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‘multicultura!’ solution” to the problems that the project contributors address. At the same time, Harwood has suggested that as much as the Mongrel artists see their task as combating racism via unorthodox methods, the Mongrei artists also intend their work as a counterweight to that of the "liberal, arty post-racists”®who in 1998, when this comment was made, would have included many of the young British artists presented in the notorious Sensation show sponsored by advertising magnate Charles

Saatchi.'*® On the one hand, then, there is a self-conscious distancing from the work of anti-racism, conventionally understood; and on the other, there is a pointed intention to offer a rebuke to those cultural workers who imagine that they work in an environment that is somehow ‘beyond race’. Mongrel’s approach to doing this kind of multifaceted, race conscious cultural work in Natural Selection can be understood by more closely examining three of the other participant sites. At one of these, for instance, one finds a mock-up of a memo said to have been circulated within the marketing division of a fictitious biotechnology company called BioCom (www.monarel.ora.uk/Naturai/Biotech/). The memo’s subject line indicates that it concerns “framing race and ethnicity in marketing new reproductive technologies, products and procedures,” a matter that is elaborated in the

transportation. Such a move helpfully frames the social nexus in which the 'digital divide' takes shape. See Graham 2001. ®Qtd in Doowrah

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document with reference to how the company might surreptitiously invoke colonial models of racial hierarchy (the multi-leveled Spanish model being preferable to the more narrowly conceived British model) to “entice the public into desiring medical intervention for the purposes of engineering children that are both instrumentally and aesthetically superior.” The document contains a number of hyperlinks that bring the reader to various ‘legitimate’ (i.e., non-Mongrel) sites; clicking on the words guarantee of temperament, for example, deliver one to a site at which one can make use of the Temperament Sorter Personality Instrument, a vehicle for personality self-assessment that gives every indication of being authentic, despite the Pynchonian absurdity of the Instrument’s name. Other linked sites include eugenics.net, called Future Generations, at which one can locate links to texts by crypto-racists like Charles Murray and J. Philippe Rushton; the fertilityopitions.com site, a source of information for potential egg donors and recipients; and the site of the Pioneer Fund, an organization devoted to supporting research in sociobiology, ‘behavioral genetics’, and evolutionary psychology (Rushton is one of its board members).^^

See Mercer, 1999-2000 '''' For a dismantling of Murray's pseudo-science in the notorious Bell Curve text, see Fischer et al; for a reading of how the shock effect of work like Murray's and Rushton's (also about putative IQ differentials among racial groups) connects with media sensationalism and right wing revanchism in today’s America, see Ross 1996.

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Whether or not this site presents a critique of corporate biotechnology that cogently corresponds to its implications for the racial politics of the present is debatable. Others have also insisted on the connection between these technologies and the eugenics movement.''^ But Gilroy, for example, sees the emergence of biotechnology as having contributed to the disappearance or at least abatement of some of the more pernicious aspects of historical racialization.^^ The aim here, however, is

less to evaluate whether the Critical Arts Ensemble, the creators of this part of Natural Selection, have put their finger on the most pertinent concerns to be addressed in this area than instead to demonstrate how the project’s brand of irony tends to function with regard to its anti-racist interventions. As suggested above, the BioCom memo itself is quite transparently parodic, the sanguine tone of the writer contrasting harshly with the sinister program he summarizes. Equally important, however, is that most of the linked material is presented ‘straight’, which is to say without alteration or comment. One is able at the Future Generations site to retrieve material that is patently racist, and Mongrel does nothing to render this possibility any more difficult to achieve. What this implies is that Natural Selection is

See Duster Gilroy's argument about the effect of contemporary work in biotechnology on the concept of race is nuanced, but the gist of it appears to be that for whatever its drawbacks, such work has by and large put to rest biologistic claims (the Pioneer

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not ultimately concerned with explicitly rebutting the texts or practices seen to be objectionable, whether because they are explicitly racist or otherwise offensive, that it not only invokes but also brings directly before its audience. Instead, Mongrel’s priority is with demonstrating how on the Internet, no less than in other important social contexts of the day, the politics of race is “shot through with violence, ambivalent desires, hidden histories and legitimation through scientific discovery and media presentation,” as the journalist Lisa Haskel puts it.^'^ To this state of affairs no solution is proposed; indeed, the point would seem to be that no solution is even conceivable while technoculture is widely treated, as we have seen in the introduction to this dissertation, as independent of any kind of conflictual racial dimension. A principal goal of Mongrel’s work, then, can be seen here: to bring together a challenge to the conception of cybercultures as ‘race neutral’ with a corresponding refusal of the contemporary invocation of a multiculturalism-beyond-confiict, exemplified by something

like the powerhouse:uk exhibit. Another of the sites constituting Natural Selection's network is Mervin Jarman’s “Yardie Immigration Advisor,” a take-off of sorts of the British Airport Authority site at which it is supposed to be possible for a

Fund notwithstanding) for essentialized race as a meaningful ground for understanding the varieties of human difference. See Gilroy 2000, pp. 19-32.

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prospective entrant to the UK to “find out [his] chances of successfully entering” the country by responding to a questionnaire devised for this purpose (wvw.monqrel.orq.uk/Naturai/BAA/heathrovi/index.htmi). The term ‘yardie’ is used to designate a Jamaican gangster, and at least part of this site is devoted to presenting the allegation that the British intelligence service M15 is willing to turn a blind eye to the violent crimes that some of the yardies it uses as informants continue to commit after they have been recruited to supply information. The name of the site is thus to a certain extent accented by irony, since for the most part it does not seem that Jarman is principally interested in offering helpful advice to those yardies whose violent activities he makes a point of deploring. (Complicating matters, however, is the fact that at times Jarman identifies himself as a yardie, thereby widening the sense of this term beyond the association with criminality.) More importantly, the site also aims to draw attention to the struggles of asylum seekers and those under order of deportation to defend themselves against the inhumane treatment of the state. Information about Tasting Freedom, a 1994 documentary about these struggles produced by the Migrant Media video collective (http://homepaqes.DODtel.orq.uk/miqrantmedia/docs/miqrant.htm). and The

People’s Tribunal on Immigration and Asylum, another 1994 documentary

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Haskel's text also compares the representation of the ''mongrel” in Natural

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piece dealing with an attempt by immigration advocates to publicize and combat abuses resulting from Britain’s immigration and asyium laws, is featured at the site. Finally, there is also an effort at the site to make the more general point that British immigration policy selectively mistreats ordinary Jamaicans seeking to enter the U.K. Jarman chooses to make this claim in the demotic voice, describing as follows the logic of immigration admissions procedures as it is applied to Jamaicans; All Jamaicans will be subject to delay as Her customs assume fit, on changes of entering. Cause we a animal dem afi quarantine we before we can enta. However! If you were invited by MIS @ScotlandYardies you will have special priority clearance, just explain to immigration that you are a Badass Yardie Gangster on special operations and you will have no problems with immigration or customs, you must remember to pick up the Walter PPK [a model of handgun] left at immigration for your comfort, we can’t allow you to be walking around London undressed now can we.

Jarman backs up the claim about British immigration agents’ abusive treatment of ordinary Jamaican visitors by providing testimony to this effect from people he knows in the travel industry, with one of these accounts explaining that British immigration officers look suspiciously upon the fact

Selection and in powerhouse::UK, albeit in brief.

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that many Jamaican visitors choose to come to the U.K. for two or three months at a time rather than the ‘proper’ two or three weeks that a typical Briton might allot for a journey abroad. Meanwhile, this account points out, no consideration is given to the fact that many Jamaican travelers to the UK may wish to make lengthier visits precisely because the cost of the air fare is for them (and/or her relatives or other hosts in the U.K.) a substantially greater burden than for her British counterpart on holiday. The Yardie site engages with the question of how race and postcoloniality factor into the British nation-state’s policing of its territorial and cultural boundaries. Both racialized national identity and the ‘improper’ performance of tourism, according to which the traveler fails to move within temporal (2-3 weeks abroad) and spatial (the questionnaire asks whether the traveler has visited or resided in global ‘hot spots’ like Colombia, Haiti or Pakistan) parameters recognized as legitimate by the nation-state’s gatekeepers, become the markers for identifying who or what is so ‘foreign’ to the interests of the state or of the national culture - the two of which are in this case seen to be effectively isomorphic - as to be admissible only on narrowly conceived grounds poorly suited to recognizing, much less supporting, the material needs and the dignity of the foreigner. This way of proceeding vis a vis the Jamaican as foreigner, this tendency to see visitors and migrants from places like Jamaica as an “alien wedge,” prevails in

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British immigration policy despite the fact that, as Jarman points out at the Yardie site, Jamaicans have managed to make an outsize contribution to U.K. cultural life.”'®That such is officially though tangentially acknowledged in the dominant culture indicates only that the national heritage is for the foreseeable future to continue be treated as if it were enough that, as Phil Cohen points out, every school textbook now makes an obligatory, if passing reference to the ‘large contributions’ which various communities have made to British society, citing achievements In the fields of the arts, sport, the professions

and other areas of public life. Having done their statutory duty to promote positive images, these texts do not feel it necessary to go into details about the collective struggles which have been waged against racism in Britain. The reader’s attention is carefully diverted from any event or movement which challenges the still dominant Whig interpretation of English history, according to which it is all a story of progress from the barbarity of slavery to the enlightenment of current race relations, courtesy of liberal reformers and the British sense of ‘fair play’!''®

The national heritage is the focus of the last of the Natural Selection sites that will be discussed here in the first section of this chapter; indeed, the site examined, which functions as a race-conscious parody of the image

The term “alien wedge” appears in a recent report on the state of racial justice/injustice in the U.K. See Runnymede Trust, p. 36.

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processing software called Photoshop, is called “Heritage Gold.” Adopting the media activist strategy that has been labeled culture jamming, Mongrel identifies the creator of this product as MongrelSoft, a mock corporate entity with a suspiciously familiar looking logo and the borrowed slogan, “Think different.”*’^ Another notable appropriation here, this one appearing at the top of the home page, is that of the royal coat-of-arms, which Mongrel reworks to include the motto “Skin Bone Blood,” while jettisoning the more properly heraldic “Dieu et Mon Droit." The irony-replete software itself is designed to allow the user to rearrange her digital images so as to “let [her] edit and transform [her] Heritage into personal works of art." To that end, “Heritage Gold” substitutes image-editing menu headings like Heritage, Mongrel, and Racialisation for Photshop’s more immediately functional alternatives. It is nevertheless still possible for the user to employ the commands listed in these menus to manipulate images, whether they be his own or those contained in the inventory of racial types (‘brown female’, ‘yellow male’, and so on) included with the software, though the possibilities afforded for altering these images are often ambiguous and in most cases probably only loosely connected to the user’s intentions. For instance, using a command like ‘The Black System’ in the Skin Table sub-menu to work on the image of a white male produces the unanticipated (but perhaps not

P. Cohen, p.40

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entirely surprising) result of appearing to give the image’s subject a sunburn. At the same time, some of the program’s commands seem to function mainly to pun on terms like ‘colour separation’ and ‘show rulers’, while using the command ‘Screen HIV’ under the sub-menu heading Historical Relations (itself falling under the heading Racialisation) opens another screen of the image being worked on. In another such visual gagas-social-commentary, images become grainier at the low end of the Social Status menu. The overall effect is to cast the user into a conceptual space where digital culture’s capacities to facilitate self-fashioning can be both parodied and slyly rerouted towards a re-examination of some of the more troublesome legacies attached to the national heritage. Prominently featured at this site is an amusing image demonstrating the efficacy of the software for re-picturing British identity in tune with a properly ‘mongrel’ aesthetic. The image is formed from the grafting together of a photograph of a five year-old Prince Charles and a postcard image of a little boy with both index fingers touching his penis while preparing to urinate (or so it appears), with the resultant image also being darkened and otherwise altered (the hair is thickened) so as to make the youthful Prince of Wales look African, or some approximation thereof. The inclusion of an image like this one is clearly intended as something of a provocation in the

On culture jamming, see Klein, pp. 279-310

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vein of Queen Elizabeth with a safety pin through her cheek. But along with culture jamming and punk, among other things, as aesthetic reference points here, we can also recognize a certain degree of novelty in what Mongrel does by bringing together the recombinant logic of Photoshop with images like this one of Prince Charles, drawn from the archives of the official national heritage. The aim in this case would seem to be to satirize 1990s attempts to salvage by dint of modernization those signifiers of the official national heritage that would otherwise resist incorporation into the contemporary realities of post-imperial British life. Think of Tony Blair’s infamous “people’s princess" remark about Diana Spencer. Here Mongrel critiques the notion that the national culture is susceptible to touching up, so to speak, in such a way as to mask over the bases for conflict among variously situated and inequitably empowered social actors. The discussion of these three Natural Selection sites is meant to indicate that they take aim, with reference to the vicissitudes of racialization and the politics of multiculturalism, at ‘information era’ ideologemes like fluidity, mobility, and recombinant identity. Unlike the powerhouse:uk exhibition, Natural Selection insists that such concepts cannot properly be understood vis a vis either the cultures of the Internet or the recomposition of British culture without taking into account the fraught histories and ongoing purchase of what Cohen has called ‘ethnic hegemony’ in the U.K.

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In this frame of reference, mobility needs to be indexed to discriminatory immigration policy, fluidity to sleight-of-hand replacements of emblems of the British Empire via sleek, market-savvy branding campaigns attempting to establish Britain’s cultural currency, and recombinant identity to the potential for biotechnology to become a ‘backdoor to eugenics’ while racialization remains such a salient reality in British society. If it is a question of promoting so-called connexity’’ ®as a ground for social cohesion, Mongel appears to be arguing, these are some of the principal points of connection that need to be taken into account. In what follows there will be an exploration of how Natural Selection attempts to simultaneously respond to developments in information technology (above all with the search engine, about which more follows in the next section) and the state management of national identity in the U.K. and the U.S. (though the focus in the last section of this chapter will be mainly on the former). The chapter’s main point is that Mongrel accomplishes some important and unique cultural work by drawing together a critique of the ‘instrumentalization’ of search technologies and an interrogation of the treatment of cultural politics in the state-sanctioned contemporary re-fashioning of British national identity. The model that Natural Selection offer for doing this kind of work is distinguished for being.

See Mulgan.

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as we have seen in the above discussion, inventive and fairly wide-ranging. Thus far, however, there has been little in the way of response on the part of cuitural critics or scholars to the Natural Selection project or any of its constituent sites. This chapter represents an initial attempt at providing this kind of response.

Re-Searching Race and the internet

For anyone attempting to do any kind of research these days, whether of a more pedestrian or more involved type, it cannot fail to be apparent that the search engine is a resource of potentially great utility. Indeed, a recognition of these capacities has even led the celebrants of this technology to eulogize over it in terms that would have been scarcely conceivable just a decade ago (more on this in a moment). At a more practical level, it would be difficult to imagine anyone in the academy completely eschewing the use of Google or one its competitor technologies while putting together a research project. Yet despite its omnipresence as part of this variety of cultural work, there has been surprisingly little commentary in academic fields like media studies or cultural studies about the contemporary purchase of this particular technology. To cite one rather

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salient example of this kind of lacuna in the academic literature on cyberspace, albeit in this case in the discipline of sociology, the recent edited volume called The internet in Everyday Life contains in its 500+ pages not a single sustained discussion of the search engine, despite the fact that a vast number of Internet users are putting this technology to work on a regular if not daily basis.^^ Of the work concerning search engines that has been done, in most cases the focus has been set relatively narrowly, so that the technology is dealt with preponderantly as a too! that may or may not respond effectively to problems like “information overload. For his part, Thomas Friedman, the pundit who uses his columns in The New York Times to pedantically lecture about the implications of various geopolitical developments for America and the American people (entities understood by him to be monolithically whole), prefers in a column entitled “Is Google God?” to focus on the threat to American national security that the search engine as a technology is supposed to support in some especially meaningful and menacing way.^^ Friedman quotes the author of a text called Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny to the effect that “homemade WMDs” aren’t the main problem to be concerned about in preventing future acts of terrorism directed against the U.S.A.; instead, we

See Wellman and Haythornthwaite. E.g., Tim Jordan's contribution to the edited volume Living With Cyberspace See Friedman.

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learn, It is the very ubiquity of “e-mail, Wi-Fi and Google" that present a problem in that they “make it easier for small groups to rally like-minded people, crystallize diffuse hatreds, and mobilize lethal force.” Another of Friedman’s sources opines that this ubiquity renders Google (coupled with the ‘holy ghost’ of Wi-Fi) “ a little bit like God,” for after all, “God is wireless, God is everywhere, and God sees and knows everything.” The upshot of this, according to Friedman, is that fringe groups of “anti-Americans” can now, by calling upon the divine powers of info-tech, “build their own little island kingdoms,” and that “their island kingdoms, which may not seem important or potent now, will be able to touch us [Americans] more, not less.” Despite its paranoid tone and analytical incoherence - Friedman never seems to recognize, for example, that the principal group of “antiAmericans” that the American government has been concerned to confront in recent years is Al Qaeda, an organization that depended less on infotech than on the Cold War maneuverings of the CIA for the early 1990s formation of its “island kingdom" - Friedman’s article is worth taking seriously to the extent that he evinces a willingness to see the search engine as an information technology with potentially vast political

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implications.^^ Characteristically (for Friedman), these implications are seen to be of import primarily to the extent that they affect America and its standing in the world. Likewise, the only response Friedman understands to be a judicious one for Americans in these circumstances is “to take the world seriously” and “to be good listeners.” One of the relatively small number of American newspaper columnists with a national readership is thus content, here as elsewhere, to extend his political analysis no further than the level of vacuous platitude. But for all the absurd apotheosizing hyperbole— whatever irony there is in the article is entirely anemic— about what Google amounts to as a quasi-theological entity, it is important to see that Friedman’s piece does represent the notion that with the advent of the search engine, among other relevant technological artifacts, political contestation conducted via technologies of knowledge distribution is liable to be more prevalent and more significant now that it has ever been. Generally speaking, this idea is not exactly novel - Casteiis’s work has been among the most prominent to demonstrate the point - but it is surprisingly seldom that the search engine, rather than a much more widely framed object like the Internet or information technologies, is spotlighted in this connection

^ For more on the rise of this organization, see Cooley. See in particular Casteiis’s text. The Power of Identity.

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In his discussion of search technologies, the German media theorist Hartmut Winkler leaves aside both the instrumental approach of examining the search engine’s practical efficacy and the channeling of divine revelation a la Friedman; he chooses instead, in a September 1998 contribution the nettime Internet discussion list, to examine the underlying logic of the Yahoo search directory, known as the “ontology,” and that of search engines like Alta Vista and Inktomi (the latter since acquired by Yahoo). Winkler explains that Yahoo’s directory of the time depended on a classification system within which twenty thousand keywords were hierarchically ordered, in part by human coders and in part by automation, so as to enable “millions of heterogeneous contributions from virtually every area of human knowledge” to be brought together “without regard to their perspectivity, their contradictions and rivalries.”^'^ The example that Winkler gives of how this system would work is that “pollution” might be listed under “Society and Culture”/Environment and Nature”/ “Pollution,” Such a system is necessarily flawed, as Winkler points out, in that there is no one to “guarantee the uniformity and inner coherence of such a hierarchy of t e r m s . E v e n in the relatively uncontroversial case of pollution, we can readily imagine certain problems of classification arising, as for instance with something like whether or not the migration of seeds of genetically

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Winkler, p.31

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modified organisms (GMOs) into the fields of organic farmers constitutes a form of pollution. But this point about the conceptual weaknesses of “the ontology” is perhaps very obvious. What is more important to recognize is that there is something veiy seductive about the way a search directory like that of Yahoo works to “keep things In their place and define for the user a position relative to this place.”^®What Winkler suggests here is that the search directory should be understood in relation to its subjectivity effects rather than simply in terms of its utility for enabling a more streamlined access to the Web than would otherwise be available. Such a suggestion may seem to be likewise obvious, but in the context of the Internet, where the subjectivity effects of certain technologies and activities have been explored in a well-nigh exhaustive way, very few of such studies have thus far been made. As for Winkler, he leaves open the question of what those subjectivity effects might look like in practice, but it is clear that with regard to both Yahoo and the search engines he discusses his main concern is that “naturalization strategies,” whereby search technologies are framed as working independently of a significantly political and ideological dimension, have tended to displace careful examination of how these technologies contribute to conditioning users’ experience of the WWW.^^

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ibid., p.31 Ibid., p.35 ibid., p.36

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Writing at an earlier, pre-Goog!e moment in the history of search technologies, Winkler’s criticisms of Yahoo and the most prominent search engines of the time is of interest now less for the specific points he makes about their limitations than for the more general question he raises about how such technologies contribute to the “centralization” of the Internet. The fact that thirty-two million users per day (the figure Winkler offers for that period of Internet history) were then making use of a search technology like Altavista indicated a trend, from the perspective of Winkler’s analysis, towards a great, if not absolute, reliance on the function of this and a few other such technologies for the operation of the Web. (In mid-2003, the total number of searches performed daily via Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN, the four companies that handle 90% of all search requests, exceeds 125 million.) Despite the fact that they were coming to play such an important role on the Internet as facilitators of information retrieval, however, this widespread concentration on using them to explore the Web, i.e., this “centralization,” is something that was “not experienced as such.” The operative logic of the ‘Web search experience’ indeed depended (and still depends) on users’ paying attention not to the technologies employed to make Web resources available to them but only to the content thereby retrieved. As Winkler writes, “the search engines can occupy such a central position only because they are assumed to be neutral in a certain way.

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Offering a service as opposed to content, they appear as neutral mediators.”^® Centralization, in this case represented by the adoption of very few search technologies by a vast number of Internet users, is a problem in this frame of reference to the degree that it is connected to the treatment of these technologies as purely instrumental and non-ideological in nature. Mongrel, meanwhile, attempts to critically respond to this

conception of the search engine as value-neutral. With Natural Selection it is a question of resisting the routinization of this technology as this process impedes full or even just adequate consideration of the technology’s social and cultural impact. Which brings us back to Google, the search technology of which is having arguably the greatest impact in the cybercultures of the present. As implied above, the arrival of Google on the Internet scene has occasioned a substantial shift in search engine or meta-search engine technology, so that the history of the search engine, which remains to be written, can be viably conceived as divided into two, pre- and post-Google periods.^® Rather than relying on an "ontology” or (strictly) on elaborate word search

Ibid., p. 30 ^ The New York Times would appear to agree, as evidenced by a March 2004 article in which writer David Hochman asserts that "Google is changing culture and consciousness" (p. B-1) The article does not, however, examine this development in political terms, but instead frames Google’s principal problem as its potential for contributing to the triviaiization of knowledge and culture. The argument that

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methodologies, Google only begins by carrying out semantics-based searches of the Web,.creating lists of all the documents containing a particular term, but then proceeds to order and rank the documents according to the number and ‘quality’ of the links made by Web users to the sites where these documents are located. This underlying measure of ‘quality’ is made in much the same way, with paramount consideration being

given to the number and ‘quality’ of links made to the secondary sites from which the hyperlinks have been made. In theory, this manner of organizing searches might be considered more ‘democratic’ for the way that it allows users’ practices and preferences, taken in the aggregate, to have some direct bearing on the results that are returned to them. Indeed, by contrast with Friedman’s alarums, this has been the sanguine perspective taken by some of the other journalistic respondents to the rise of this new technology.^” Further, since the practice of hyperlinking to another site is for the most part restricted only by access to the relevant software (along with, obviously, the acquired skills necessary to deploy it), as welt as an investment of time and energy, it would seem to leave the field open to a wide variety of points of view being represented by the very large assemblage of Web site proprietors who take up this practice and use it to

follows suggests that this way of treating Google misses a far more significant point about its effects as a newly paradigmatic instrument of knowledge gathering.

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represent and circulate their own positions and preferences. But it appears that such conclusions about the democratization effects of Google are too hastily drawn. Two fellows at Harvard’s National Center for Digital Government, Matthew Hindman and Kenneth Neil Gukier, have found in their research on online political communities that the members of such communities overwhelmingly point their hyperlinks towards the most popular sites dealing with their topic of interest (Hindman and Gukier focus on such topics as abortion and capital punishment). As the researchers put it in their New York Times Op-Ed piece, “Users may be able to choose from millions of sites, but most go to only a

In an interview on Australian radio,

Hindman attributed this problem in large part to the link-based search engine technology of the Google type. With regard to the sites where he performed the research mentioned above, Hindman reported: (W)hat you find, even in these communities which are supposed to be an opportunity for people to express their views, is that almost all of the links point to a few very successful sites, and because people tend to follow links in order to find sites, and because they tend to use search engines,

As in Wired Magazine's "The Complete Guide to Googiemania," for example. Go to See Hindman and Gukier.

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and search engines look at links in order to find sites, basically It means that diversity on the web is much shallower than it appears

Hindman goes on to point out that the putative diversity of opinion on the

Web, regardless of the fact that it would appear to be not actually pursued as such by the vast majority of Web users, has served as a pretext in the U.S.A. for some on the Federal Communication Commission to justify relaxing its restrictions on cross media ownership vis a vis television and

radio.^^ There is thus evidence of a tendency in practice for Google’s searches to channel knowledge gathering - and perhaps debate - into the relatively narrow straits containing the most well-known interventions on a particular topic.^ But isn’t this just a function, a skeptic might object, of a misuse of

“ See the transcript of Hindman's Australia Broadcasting Corporation interview at

^ It is interesting to consider in this connection just how much these FOG members’ position resembles a tendency in cultural studies scholarship, criticized by Marjorie Ferguson and Peter Golding in the mid-1990s, to decisively privilege questions of consumption and identity formation over those of political economy. Ferguson and Golding write of this tendency: "[Wjhere do claims of inclusivity stand when issues of changing media technology, ownership, regulation, production, and distribution are shrugged off and only those of consumption are addressed?" (xiv). " Here it bears mentioning that there is another very large problem with the way Internet search tools are deployed in practice. The focus at this point in the chapter will be mainly, with Hindman and Gukier, on some of the structural problems in a search technology like Google's, but it also needs to be recognized that the operators of Internet search tools accept paid ads to be included in their listings, and that these ads are not always clearly segregated from the other hits that a search returns to a user. This obviously creates the potential for confusion among

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the technology, so that any tendency towards the condensation of Web searches around sites owned by large media corporations - as for example with news, where “every single one of the top 20 news websites is owned by a large media corporation”^®- is less about the technology itself than the preferences and/or proclivities of those who use it? Perhaps. One thing that certainly needs to be recognized in this connection is that media consolidation, an issue much larger than what happens in the realm of Google, is a very important factor feeding into the ways that this technology ends up being employed to lead its users preponderantly towards the most well established Web sites. After acknowledging that Google operates in a

media environment characterized by ever increasing consolidation of ownership, however, it is also important to ask how much users of this search engine may end up limiting their inquiries into various topics of interest to them based on their belief that Google will automatically deliver the most important, relevant and accurate information rather than simply whatever information is made available at the most frequently consulted Web sites (and obviously certain users will be content to equate the two).®®

searchers about the status of the information that they locate in the their searches. For a little bit more about how "paid inclusion" works, see Sullivan. See Hindman. McChesney's work is an invaluable resource for understanding the political economy of media consolidation. Of particular interest in this connection is the chapter "Will the Internet Set Us Free?" in his Rich Media, Poor Democracy.

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We might describe this as the “I’m Feeling Lucky" effect, after the convenience function that Google offers, with a certain amount of irony, with the aim of delivering to the user a singularly relevant link without the muss and fuss otherwise known as conducting research. Because a substantial number of users is likely enough to regularly decide in favor of ‘feeling lucky’, this orientation to direct users away from doing research is bound to be perpetuated as the amount of traffic, and thus the number of hyperlinks, towards the relatively few, well-situated Web sites that already have been given the most attention would be i n c r e a s e d T h e consequence here, as Hindman points out, is that the diversity of viewpoints represented on the Web Is liable to be substantially curtailed rather than broadened. What makes this point especially worth considering is that, to come back to Winkler’s recognition about the search engine as both a vehicle and beneficiary of centralization, Google is most likely not understood in these terms by a large number of the users who go to it to conduct searches. The notion of the ‘neutrality’ and functional indifference of this technology to the way users take it up must be in a great many cases simply taken for granted. This is not to imply that passive users have thus been somehow

Everett connects this tendency to take up the most readily available information what she calls the "click fetish," meaning the seductive pull of the instantanaeity effects of hypertext. She also appears to see this as a problem vis a vis Google and other search to the degree that it can channel knowledge gathering into narrow straits.

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duped by the promises 'of this technofogy, but instead that given time and access constraints, users probably prefer to make use of those technologies that give them readiest access to the information they require, or some approximation thereof.^® Recognizing this underlying contributing cause for the current state of affairs does not, however, remove the imperative to confront the consequences of the widespread use of Google to perform searches. On the contrary, the structural problem with Google identified by Hindman, that in the aggregate it conduces to the reproduction of narrow frameworks for knowledge gathering on the Web, deserves

ongoing careful analysis.^® Though the Natural Selection project, with its ‘Hot Search’ rubrics like Travel and White Goods, was undertaken more as a response to the Yahoo-type search directory than to Google, its successor as the search engine of choice on the Internet, much of what the Mongrel artists do with this piece can be seen as serving to undermine the wider centralization effects discussed above with regard to both of these types of Web search technology. In any case, the neat distinction between the two technologies that would once have been readily drawn Is now, after Yahoo and Google

^ See Hindman Another important source to consult in this regard is the British media scholar Colin Sparks's interrogation of the notion of the "global public sphere," in which he posits that with the Internet we have so far seen only that "the distribution of

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began a collaboration in the summer of 2000, a good deal more difficult to make. With Natural Selection, the fact that the artists provide the Web searcher with the kind of link not likely to be atop the lists of resources typically returned to someone looking for racist material would seem to indicate that they wish to draw attention to how anomalous it would be for certain minoritarian voices to make their appearance not only in the context of a search motivated by racism, but also more generally for such voices to appear anywhere near the center of the notionally diverse array of interventions that the search engine is seen to make available to the user.

Putting Natural Selection’s minoritarian contributors to the fore in this way works to support a logic of ‘re-naturalization’, at least according to one of the contributors to the project, who writes with pointed irony that “it is obvious that the British Airports Authority site would ‘want’ to link to information about people getting killed by anti-immigration police. It is obvious that someone looking for information on fertility treatments would want to find sites mixing the histories of different acts of racial improvement into a corporate brochure.”^® Put in the place of the “obvious” here, the taken-for-granted, are information sites that enable the user to make connections between government and corporate policies and practices and

communicative resources ... in general maps very closely on to thee well-known contours of of economic and political power” (p.18). Fuller, pp. 69-70

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the fraught histories of racial injustice. As cybertheorist Anna Munster has written about Mongrel member Graham Harwood’s Uncomfortable Proximity project for the Tate Modern, by following Mongrel’s corrective logic we may find “links to the excluded, the minor, the disenfranchised and those obliterated from public and institutional histories.’^"' The user of Natural Selection is thus invited to look more closely at both the de facto

marginalization on the Internet of the kind of anti-racist knowledge that the project’s sites present and the Information technology-supported protocols

whereby this kind of marginalization is sustained. But this kind of critical installment of cultural work voicing minoritarian concerns at the heart of Web search circuits is only the most obvious and immediate way that the work responds to the continual reproduction of a relatively shallow diversity (to paraphrase Hindman) via Yahoo or Google. Still more importantly, Natural Selection serves to broaden the grounds for performing anti-racism on the Internet so as to bring up the question of what it would mean to treat the racialization and racism therein not as isolated within the domain of Web sites at which white supremacists and anti-racists do battle over the cultural politics of

Munster, p. 3; for more information about the Uncomfortable Proximity project, which involved Harwood's curatorial reorganization of selected emblematic works from the Tate collection into his own race- and class-informed commentary on the institution, see Matthew Fuller's critical piece "Breach the Pieces" at www.tate.org.uk/netart/mat2.htm.

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whiteness, but Instead as something that is more constitutive, more central to topics or discourses that have been given priority within the epistemological terrain of the Internet. Saying as much is not meant to disavow the importance of carefully examining Internet modalities of ‘white power’ ideologies; on the contrary, a great deal of useful scholarship has been undertaken around the phenomenon of white supremacists’ use of the Internet to foment their message and to adapt their movements, such as they are, to constantly evolving technological change."^^ And one of the contributor sites to the Natural Selection project, the one already mentioned above which features the artist and theorist Stewart Home’s splicing together of bonehead punk rock and queer-inflected disco anthems to unveil the homosocial subtext of white power subcultures, is explicitly concerned with making an intervention in this context. But as Gilroy persuasively argued a decade and a half ago in a reflection on the late 70s work of the Anti-Nazi League in Britain, an important political opportunity is missed when anti-racist projects focus too closely on combating neofascism at the expense of concentrating on more pervasive and perhaps less readily discernible forms of racism. Back then Gillroy suggested that the emphasis on neo-fascism as the most dangerous embodiment of contemporary racism inevitably pulls discussion of ‘race’ away from the

See, among others, Back; Back at al; Beckles; Loow; and Zickmund

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centre of political culture and relocates it on the margins where [neofascist] groups are doomed to remain. To exaggerate the importance of their activities and allow them to become dominant in the definition of racism risks the suggestion that racism is an aberration or an exceptional problem essentially unintegrated into the social and political structure.'*^

Though one of the conceits of Natural Selection is that it will divert the unsuspecting racist from the white power sites that his use of a racial epithet as a search term might summon up, Mongrel is perhaps ultimately far less concerned with accomplishing a comparatively impracticable goal such as this one than with collapsing the notion, via a diversion of the search engine technology, that racism occupies a marginal place in the political culture of the Internet.'^ In this sense, another way of talking about how the hacking works in this project might be to say that with Natural Selection we are diverted back towards the center of Internet racism, to the extent that 1. we find ourselves at something of a central place within the geography of the Internet - which is to say, at an oft-employed search directory that Mongrel has hacked for the project: and 2. anti-racist confrontation may now occur anywhere within the Web - at the randomized center, as it were - rather than strictly within the relatively confined domain

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of anti-racist web sites and their white power opposite numbers. This kind of re-focusing so as to allow critica! minoritarian perspectives on racism and racialization to appear as readily as other kinds of information more typically given attention chez Yahoo— and here we can think of Mongrel’s parodic invocation of a Hot Search category like White Goods—works both as anti­ racism and as internet/search technology critique.

In a 2000 article about the Natural Selection project and Web search technologies Matthew Fuller writes;

Go to search engines of either sort [meaning, hierarchical or selforganising] and type in Jamaica. You’ll get information on holidays coming up first— along with banner adverts for Sandals resort. Type in Africa and you’ll predominantly get wildlife and famine. Self-organisation of data is organised on the basis of what 'self is determined to be important. This, at present, is something put into play by the demographics of internet use. How data is interpreted and processed... has immense importance.

In an interview in the cyberjoumal geekgirl in 1999, Harwood reports that along with estranging online search technologies, "the idea [in Natural Selection] is to pull the rug from underneath racist material on the net."

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Finding ways in which this process can be opened up to speculation and organisation by other forms of ‘self even more.'*®

The gist of Fulier’s observation here is that no matter how much the internet expands the range of information resources available to the user, the underlying assumptions about what constitutes the type of information meriting priority have changed very little as a result of the advent of the search engine. The assumption that ‘Jamaica’ is principally of interest to those in the global North as a potential tourist destination is one that obviously did not arise through the use of Web search technologies: by the same token, however, Google serves to reify this understanding as one that ‘logically’ takes precedence over other kinds of concerns. This is at least partly a problem of demographics, as Fuller indicates, with the typologized ‘self of his critique most likely to be American and sufficiently solvent to consider vacationing in a place like Jamaica. But in Natural Selection Mongrel’s attention is drawn less to the effects of the pervasiveness of Americans on the Internet than it is to the capacity of Google, Yahoo and company, to the extent that their mechanics qua search technologies go unexamined, to help perpetuate this view of Jamaica as tourist playground as something like the inevitable outcome of globalization.'*® Accepting the

Fuller, p. 96 Speaking of the designation of American Web sites by generic prefixes like .com and .gov and the use in the rest of the world of suffixes indicating geographical

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legitimization of such an ordering of knowledge about Jamaica seems to leave little room for envisioning and enacting alternatives to a global division of labor in which Jamaicans' primary role is to staff the holiday resorts hoping to attract visitors from the North.'^^ While Google is certainly not the only site within which these North-South power inequities are subjected to reification, it is, as both Fuller and Friedman acknowledge {though with the latter in much different, far less cogent terms), a greatly important context for the circulation and reproduction of forms of knowledge corresponding to both the cultural politics and the political economy of globalization. Haraway, meanwhile, ties the problem that Fuller means to address to the ideology of connexity, whereby the technologically enabled capacity to make connections among different types of knowledge sites and agents is seen to be in and of itself a social good. Within the ‘connexionist’ frame of reference, what lies behind the search engine’s appeal to the user is the notion that such technology opens up a network of information resources wherein hypertext links offer almost unlimited possibilities for bringing

location (for example, .ca for Canada), Gunkel writes of the former practice that it "positions Americans at the center of the virtual world and literally designates everything else as 'foreign' and 'alien'" (2002, p. 85). But it also needs to be mentioned here that the Caribbean has been a site to which North American corporations have gone to find a low-paid, Englishspeaking work force to perform data processing jobs. See Skinner.

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people and ideas together into new and productive association.'*® As we have already seen, in actual practice these possibilities may go largely unexploited, as users make connections only within a substantially circumscribed frame of reference. From her perspective Haraway emphasizes another problem, this one having to do with the danger that where connexity is conceived in an overly instrumental fashion, the utopian longing so vital to her vision of cyborg politics will be left aside; Although the metaphor of hypertext Insists on making connections as practice, the trope does not suggest which connections make sense for which purposes and which patches we might want to follow or avoid. Communication and articulation disconnected from yearning towards possible worlds does not make enough sense. And explicit purposes— politics, rationality, ethics or technics in a reductive sense— do not say much about the furnace that is personal and collective yearning for just barely possible worlds.'*®

The implication here is that the search engine and practices of “making connections” ought to be attached to a careful assessment of this technology and these practices in terms of their potential to contribute to a movement towards remaking the epistemological contours of the historical

See Mulgan for a promotion of this notion of connexity and Boltanski for a critique of this concept. Haraway 1997, p. 130

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conjuncture we inhabit. Haraway's analysis stresses something that Fuller alludes to above: the exigency that search technologies be examined and understood not only in terms of what knowledge projects or worldviews they tend at present to highlight or to support, but also with a view to recognizing what is missing from, what is left out of the technocultura! reckoning of which they are such an important part. For both Haraway and for Fuller, as well as for Mongrel in Natural Selection, the work of pointing out the inequities and ideological blind spots of cybercultures is carried out in the name of locating modes of thought and action in which the “personal and collective yearning for just barely possible worlds” can be given some kind of necessarily speculative expression vis a vis the contemporary politics of multiculturalism.

National Identity and Multiculturalism from the Mongrel Perspective In an interview with cyber-scholar Geert Lovink in 2000, Mongrel member Graham Harwood specifically renounces multiculturalism as a state-administered strategy to circumvent minoritarian efforts at counteracting what he calls the “migratory and multifaceted” nature of contemporary racism.^ In connection with this point, he identifies as one of the most lamentable aspects of the British government’s version of

“ Lovink, p. 253

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multicuituralist policy that It would include doing things like ordering embassies abroad to "cover the walls with Britart and remove the portraits of old colonial rulers. ..[r|emove all reference to colonial rule,” Harwood’s objection to this approach to administering the national heritage, which might otherwise be seen as a small but not totally inconsequential step towards satisfying a multicuituralist demand to ameliorate state institutions by removing from them anything that patently emblematizes the social and cultural injustices of the past, is that it serves the dubious interest of reinventing, or at least reframing, the representation of British imperial history so as to effectively disconnect it from ongoing critique by those who wish to demonstrate how contemporary racism and racialization are both rooted in the colonial past and continually mutating in line with new historical developments in the constitution and operation of the nation-state, as well as with changes occurring within transnational civil society.®’’ Such a cultural policy indeed dispenses with certain especially charged symbols of empire, but only at the cost, as Harwood sees it, of ignoring contemporary manifestations of racial domination. By contrast. Natural Selection focuses on confronting the contemporary politics of race in the U.K. with specific reference to the technologies of information and

Ibid., p. 248

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communication that are now perhaps more than ever before being seen as apposite to issues of national identity and state governance.®^ In the next section, I want to analyze the cultural politics of Mongrel’s project in a framework provided by two mid-1990s texts that in vastly divergent ways and to greatly different ends present arguments - in one case an argument that is to some degree implicit and very schematic, though not for that lacking in influence in British politics ~ concerning how cultural diversity might be most felicitously and democratically approached in polyethnic, parlimentary nation-states of the West like the U.K. or the U.S. Along the way, there will also be brief discussion of the broader topic of the sociologist Anthony Giddens’s role in promoting the so-called Third Way, the ‘center-left’ political platform that has been proposed in certain quarters in (principally) the U.K. and the U.S. as the most viable alternative to both Thatcherite neo-liberalism and existing models of social democracy that are now allegedly outmoded or otherwise unworkable.®^ This part of the

“ Slater and Miller, pp.85-115; Poster 2001,101-128; Morley 2000. Habermas, writing a little bit avant la lettre, was able to describe with great accuracy the bases upon which the 'legitimists' (his term for the "conservative wing of the social-democratic parties" in Europe and the U.S.) proceed: "The legitimists delete from the welfare state project precisely the components it had derived from the utopian idea of a laboring society. They renounce the goal of overcoming heteronomous labor so that the status of the free citizen with equal rights extends into the sphere of production and can become the nucleus around which autonomous forms of life crystallize. Today the legitimists are the true conservatives, who want to stabilize what has been achieved. They hope to find a

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section will try to show how a net art piece like Natural Selection works to provide a critical minoritarian perspective on Giddens’s embrace of information technologies as the foundation of the new political order his work aims to inaugurate. The section as a whole will be oriented towards drawing out connections between Mongrel's critical redeployment of the search engine/Internet directory technology to focus on significant concerns in the realm of cultural politics, both in the specific context of the U.K. and

elsewhere, and some noteworthy interventions by public intellectuals of every stripe during the last decade into the debates over multiculturalism and/or the social and cultural implications of the ever increasing prevalence of information technologies. The first of the two texts that this section will center on, entitled BritainTM and published in 1997, emerged from the think tank known as Demos, formed by apostates from Marxism in 1993 and offering ‘new centrist' public policy recommendations that have played an important role

in the Labor Party’s governance of the U.K. since the 1997 election of Tony Blair. The text, slim but much discussed for its advocacy of ‘rebranding’ Britain, aims to lay the foundation for a project designed to increase the appeal of the country and its goods and services on the international

point of equilibrium between the development of a welfare state and modernization based on a market economy" (p.293).

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market. !t appears under the signature of Mark Leonard, who at the perhaps premature age of 23 then held the title of “senior researcher” at Demos. In the years following the publication of this text, Leonard was to become something of an expert in the area of rebranding; his 1998 Demos report, Rediscovering Europe, was co-published by Interbrand Newell and Sorrell, an imprint of the Interbrand Group (which bills itself as the “world's leading branding and identity business”), and offers, like BntalnTM, a group of brand-consolidating ‘narratives’ (the inverted commas are Leonard’s) meant to bolster the European Union’s image within Britain by highlighting some of the supposedly overlooked social and cultural benefits of participation within the EU.^ But here let us draw the focus to BritainTM. The narratives that Leonard would see attached to “Cool Britannia,” as the expression has it, are the following: “The Nation of Fair Play” (invoking, in earnest it seems, the “sense of cricket” as a foundation for British Identity); “Britain as Silent Revolutionary” (giving credit to Britons for the invention of parlimentary government, post offices and best of all for neoliberais, Thatcherite privatization of state resources): “Creative Island” (....in which England claims for itself the mantle of world historical leader in high art and popular

^ See Leonard 1998. For an informative and timely discussion of the methods and politics of the branding industry, see Klein.

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culture): “Open For Business” (a sort of encomium to British retail); and finally and most importantly in the present context, “Hub UK “ ("The UK has always been a central passageway of goods, people and ideas, etc.”) and the “United Colours of Britain" (“The country is now home to people of nearly every race and religion.’’). A general comment that might be made about all of these categories is that they recall, mutatis mutandis, Paul Gilroy’s critique of the Left historian E.P. Thompson”s “defence of Britain” in the 1983 text of the same name. In Thompson’s text, Gilroy notes, “preferred elements of English/British culture and society are described as if their existence somehow invalidated the side of (the] national heritage from which socialists are inclined to disassociate themselves.”®®Of course, the narratives that someone like Thompson offers, geared towards retelling (white) working class British history in a fashion that departs from larger, hegemonic national histories, derive from a perspective that is by no means politically or methodologically co-terminous with Demos’s purveyance of ‘third way’ ideologemes. But just as Gilroy intends in his critique of Thompson, with BritainTM we must ask why these certain narratives have been chosen in lieu of other possibilities, and whether the former are at all adequate to the task of capturing the most pressing realities in the contemporary U.K. Looking more particularly at the last two of Leonard’s

Gilroy 1987, p.55

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narratives reveals that they offer features specifically gauged to trumpeting the theme of diversity in order to enhance the value of Britishness on the globe! stage. The question that follows on this observation is whether the manner In which such diversity is presented in these narratives meaningfully reflects the interests of those who are the post-colonial designees of the term “people of nearly every race and religion.” In a chapter of his text entitled, “Shaping Our Identity,” Leonard contrasts his own six narratives with “stories” from an earlier historical moment that tended to associate Britain and British identity with long-term structural elements of the nations’s social life like industrial capitalism or Protestantism. Such stories, Leonard announces, “have lost their resonance” in today’s Britain.®® In their absence “we need new stories that both reach back into our history and project forward into the future.”®^ One way to do that is to focus on “Britain as the world’s crossroads,” as Leonard does in his discussion of the story known as “Hub U.K.” With an emphasis on the British Empire’s investment in technologies of transportation and communication, the author of “Hub U.K.” provides a version of the history of these technologies according to which “Britain developed technology to link the world and speed it up; from the Cutty Sark and clipper ships to

Leonard 1997, p. 48 ibid., p. 48

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transoceanic calls, from the London underground to radio, from the early land and sea speed records to the steam engine and the jet engine, from the Stockton and Darlington Railway to the Concorde.”®® Much of what follows in the story is in the same vein, with Leonard’s version of “mapping world communication”®®consistently foregrounding the technologies employed to move capital, information or travelers (with mention of The City’s currency markets, British Airways, the BBC, and so forth) rather than any of those cultural and social developments related to Britain’s status as global “central passageway” that cannot be effectively reduced to technological determinants. Aside from tourists, the only historical actors that appear in this schema are world explorers like Raleigh or Cook, who are celebrated for their achievements without any mention of the historical context of conquest and systematic exploitation of colonial peoples and territories. The ‘Hub’ is thus construed as a site where Britain’s “industries of speed and connection” can be admired and promoted in a freshly minted national narrative that omits any discussion of the historical conditions under which these industries have been developed or deployed.®® Likewise, in the ‘Hub’ there is no space for acknowledging that the “central passageway” has historically been characterized by inequitable modes of

^ Ibid.. p.49 See Mattelart 60 Ibid., p.49

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political and cultural representation that the technologies of speed and connection have not always served to mitigate, but have in fact often been used to sustain and refine. And finally, it is clear that what Negri and Hardt call the continually emerging “biopolitical aspect of circulation and mixture” among people of widely varying cultural backgrounds (either within the context of the nation-state or across national boundaries), a phenomenon with political valences that they contrast to “other meanings attributed to postmodern circulation, such as market exchanges or the velocity of communication,” is left entirely out of consideration when Leonard delivers up his reckoning on the present status and future significance of the ‘Hub.’®'*

In this section of the text, then, Leonard’s “reaching back into...history” is performed in the near complete absence of both historical context and analytical capacity to speak meaningfully about “where [the] nation has come from, and where it is going,” unless one allows that such a discussion can viably focus in an almost exclusive way on the nation’s technologies of “speed and connection" rather than on the various cultures within the nation that draw upon and constantly resignify these technologies.®^ The companion piece to the ‘Hub’ is the “United Colours of Britain,” a title that will ring familiar to any reader acquainted with the Italian apparel

Negri and Hardt, p. 363 Leonard 1997, p. 48

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company and multicultural marketing pioneer Benetton. But Leonard doesn’t note the debt to Benetton in this particular story, and it is true that his own representation of the diversity of British society diverges in substantial ways from Benneton’s own approach to invoking the multicultural. Whereas the latter has often chosen in its print advertisements to use models and garments of different colors to compose a kind of patchwork meant as a vague and apolitical synecdoche for a multicultural corporate identity, Leonard has relatively little use for even this much of a representation of racial ‘samples.’ Aside from citing statistics on the number of those in Britain who “describe themselves as belonging to a ‘non-white’ group," Leonard does remarkably little in this particular story to suggest that the British nation has benefited from or been substantially shaped by the cultural interventions of these non-white citizens and residents of a “country that that thrives on diversity and uses it to constantly renew and re-energise itself.”®^ Instead, he devotes this section of his book to noting examples of ‘hybridity’ like the following; "Britain’s royal family mixed together German, Danish and, more recently, Greek ancestry”®^ This should probably be understood as an attempt to reject myths of national or ethnic or cultural purity, but it is nevertheless hard to accept the Windsors’ basically AngloSaxon ‘hybridity’ as an even marginally adequate illustration of the notion

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that “Britain is the least pure of European countries, more mongrel and better prepared for a world that is continually generating hybrid forms,”®^ Nor does the fact that "Chicken Tikka is one of Marks and Spencer’s biggest exports" seem to summon up the full purport of post-coioniality in the British context.®® For Leonard, however, it is not merely a question of choosing his examples of hybridity poorly. The term “mongrel” would seem to be working in his “United Colours” as a kind of shibboleth that allows him to declare the politics of multiculturalism an already settled issue, this having been well established via developments like the local and global marketability of British-produced Indian cuisine, and having been resolved primarily and rightly in the commercial interest of the nation-state and the entrepeneurial activities it serves to support, regardless of whether or not such a notional resolution of the matter could also be said to directly and substantially benefit those minority groups who have been historically excluded from wholly vested participation in British political life. Those groups, in other words, to whom a term like “mongrel” might historically have been applied with the intent to mark them out not as ‘colourful’ but as alien and undesirable, as insufficiently British.®^

Ibid.. p.56 Ibid., p. 56 ®®ibid., p. 56 One need go no further back in British history than April, 2000, for an example of this more traditional and phobic conception of the idea of mongrel identity by

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The rest of Leonard’s branding narrative might likewise be wondered about in terms of its capacity to represent the cultural processes and products it is meant to encompass in such a way as to properly situate information technologies or the products and agents of the multiculture in the history and post-history of the British Empire. It does not take much critical acumen, for example, to ask whether the discussion in “Open For Business,” with its invocation of a “nation of shopkeepers,”®®does enough to take account of the sentiments gathered up in a racial epithet like ‘Cornershop’, pointedly applied to South Asian merchants to mark them as a stigmatized other whose allotted place in the national consciousness has historically been colored by resentment over their ownership and operation of such shops.®® It might even be looked at as an ironic commentary on one of Leonard’s other narrative categories, “Creative Island,” that the pop band of the young Punjabi Briton musician Tjinder Singh has taken the name

someone prominent in the nation's public life. At that time the Tory MP John Townsend made well-publicized remarks in which he expressed revulsion over the notion that the British could ever be seen as a "mongrel race," all the while making it clear that the "enormous increase in asylum seekers," whom both the Conservatives and Labour had by then already succeeded in vilifying as part of the ongoing election campaign, was to be blamed for raising the possibility of a contamination of the national identity, among other things. See also Talal Asad's brilliant critique of then-Minister of State John Patten's text, "On Being British," the government's paternalistic and ethnocentric intervention into the politics of the Rushdie affair. Patten's text lectures immigrants on the core values, allegedly shared in common by native Britons as a whole, that they must accept if they wish to be recognized as sufficiently British for full inclusion in public life. Leonard 1997, p. 57 Brah 1996, pp. 283-4; Zuberi, pp. 541-543

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Cornershop for its own, thus creatively confronting the inhabitants of the “small island with big ideas" with a constant reminder of this particular strand of English racism/® This last note is perhaps ail the more worth mentioning since in his bullet point summation of the contributions of Britons to pop music “innovation” (in the “Creative Jsiand” section of the text) Leonard doesn’t see fit to say more about the impact of blackcuftura! work in this area than that “the ethnic mix of West Indians and Asians has developed new types of music from dance music to trip-hop,”'”' thus assigning the agency behind these developments to the (accidental?) “ethnic mix” itself, something to which the nation’s brand managers can then broadly lay claim, rather than to the specific interventions of any of the

actual innovators; people like Goldie, Tricky, Roni Size, and Talvin Singh, to name just a few examples/^

Leonard 1997, p. 52 Ibid.. p. 56 72 Neglect of the impact of these artists and others like them on British culture is also a problem in pop music journalism and in the academic literature. Focusing on drum ’n' bass musicians, McRobbie noted in 1999 that these artists "are producing the most innovative and dynamic aesthetic in music since reggae, but there are so few black scholars, intellectuals and critics who have made their way up through the ranks of the academy or into journalism that there are virtually no voices of representation, never mind debate, except those coming from other, largely hidden, spaces" (119). For an important exception to this general absence of careful consideration of the cultural politics of British dance music, see Sharma etal. 1996.

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BritainTM has been roundly criticized by many on the left in the U.K., above all for its seeming obliviousness to the tortured histories and methodological ironies underlying its production.^^ Paul Gilroy derides Leonard’s work in the following terms: Something as stubbornly elusive as postcolonial British identity can supposedly be designed on the drawing board and then projected into the world with such subtle force that it springs to life irrespective of any manifest historical or political obstacles to its spontaneous production.^'*

Appearing in a chapter called “Hitler Wore Khakis; Icons, Propaganda and Aesthetic Politics” in one of his recent texts, Gilroy’s remark makes clear that Leonard’s promotion of Britain as a brand can be indexed against not only against the specific political and cultural legacies of the British Empire, but also against the intensive application of public relations and marketing to the engineering of consent, or at least substantial compliance, to some of the 20*** century’s (other) most brutal nationalist and expansionist projects. The fact that BritainTM is less a propaganda project than a kind of postmodern marketing scheme intended to remove global consumers’ ‘incorrectly’ dismissive attitudes about goods and services they identify as British does not mean that that it is any less urgent to subject it to this kind

E.g., in the 2000 edited volume called Cultural Capitalism: Politics After New Labour. See Bewes and Gilbert. " Gilroy 2000, p. 152

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of historicization. Any move to reorient representations of the nation-state at this point, Gilroy implies, must thus not be separated from a careful analysis of the role of communications technologies in their historical practice/® Alongside the unequivocal resistance of Gilroy and others to the rebranding project a la Demos, there are others who have suggested that the think tank’s intervention into the production of British identity is, for all the methodological and ideological problems that arise in Leonard’s stories, in principle a viable approach to take to judiciously (re)mediating the nation’s self-representations. Anthony Giddens, for example, offers the view that “(t)alk of Cool Britannia in the UK, and of ‘rebranding Britain’ , fumbling though they might be, mark a recognition that national identity needs to be actively shaped, in dialogue with other identities.”^® Now, it is true that by

Meanwhile, efforts also need to be made to trace the genealogy of BritainTM through earlier self-representations of the British nation. Philip Dodd’s work on the discursive break in turn of the century treatments of national identity is especially resonant in this context. Echoing the discourse of Englishness that, as Dodd explains, helped to consolidate a particular, hegemonic version of the national culture in the period between 1880-1920, in Leonard's work "the people of these islands with their diverse cultural identities [are] invited to take their place, and become spectators [and consumers] of a culture already complete and represented for them by its trustees" (Dodd, p. 22). ^®Giddens 1998, p. 137; McLaughlin notes that within the government itself skepticism was eventually voiced about the 'Cool Britannia: project: "In a speech given in November 2001, Tessa Jowell, Minister for Culture, Media and Sport dispatched ‘Cool Britannia’ to the dustbin of history. She declared that although well-meaning in intent, the ‘Cool Britannia’ project had failed because it did not realise that 'our national culture is something amorphous, something changing, and something complex', defined by and open to external influences." Jowell's response to this problem did not lead away, however, from some of the fundamental problems in the BritainTM approach to framing British cultural life

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distancing himself somewhat from Leonard’s “fumbling methods” Giddens appears to reject the notion that such ‘shaping’ of national identity can legitimately be carried out simply by drafting up a series of Power Points designed to convey the commercial appeal of the new and improved national concept. But it is not at all clear, either from this remark or from the whole of Giddens’s recent work, that he otherwise objects to a recasting of national identity that leaves aside those aspects of the postcolonial culture that might not lend themselves to ready incorporation Into a larger narrative founded on allegedly consensus national values, so long as such this kind of national ‘togetherness’ can be designated as somehow ‘dialogicai.’ The point is worth exploring in greater detail, since as with Leonard’s work we can once again recognize with Giddens’s writings on politics and globalization a significant, if largely unarticulated, link between the treatment of Information technologies and that of cultural politics in multi­ racial Britiain. Though his more academic approach to dealing with the question of national regeneration diverges from Leonard’s would-be populist and consumer-friendly attempt to (re)shape the national identity.

when the British Tourist Authority launched the 'UK OK' campaign in early 2002. As McLaughlin explains, "The new ‘back to basics’ campaign seeks to retraditonalise the country’s image ... UK OK’ plays on the idea that it is impossible to imagine a Britain without the eternal representations of cultural heritage, e.g.. historic houses, castles, gardens etc. The campaign also foregrounds British eccentricity, rather than cultural diversity."

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the contention here will be that Giddens nevertheless ends up sounding a lot like his colleague of the center-left intelligentsia. Giddens’s position as the “most influential ideologue of modernity," as Frederic Jameson calls him, has been cemented in part by his own close connection to Tony Biair’s Labour government and its so-called Third Way program.

His advocacy of the Third Way has been gauged towards

helping the British government respond in a politically regenerative way to what he sees to be the most salient world historical concerns of the moment. Thus in 2000’s The Third Way and Its Critics, he writes: Third way politics, as I conceive It, is not an attempt to occupy a middle ground between top-down socialism and free-market philosophy. It is concemed with restructuring social democratic doctrines to respond to the twin revolutions of globalization and the knowledge economy."''®

Among the most important social changes for social democrats to take into account at this point, then, the ones that require a Blairite overhaul of the Labour Party (for instance), are the ones having to do with the spread of information technologies. Explicitly paired with the emphasis on information technology is a call for government to support the cultivation of “social

^ Jameson 2002, p. 218; meanwhile, Bourdieu and Wacquant have attacked Giddens in still more vituperative terms as the "Pangloss" of globalization. See their polemical 2001 Radical Philosophy article on the "new planetary vulgate." Giddens, p. 163

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capital,” represented by the “trust networks” that according to Giddens "make possible the everyday civility that is crucial to effective public life.”^'’ Such arguments, perhaps uncontroversia! enough on the surface, bear mentioning in the present context because in his turn towards promoting the Third Way in the last decade Giddens has at the same time declined to address, for the most part, the political, social or cultural problems surrounding racial and ethnic identity in the U.K. or elsewhere; for example, as editor of a 2002 volume of essays devoted to discussing the Third Way in a global context, he chose to almost entirely ignore such issues, with just three pages of the text in total dealing with the topic of cultural diversity or directly related m atters.Likew ise, in the text authored by Giddens cited directly above, the sociologist confines himself to treating the topic tangentially, opining without elaboration at one point that “even in its milder forms, identity politics tend to be exclusivist, and difficult to reconcile with the principles of tolerance and diversity upon which an effective civil society

depends.”®”* Without engaging in polemics about whether identity politics tends to be any more de facto exclusivist than what are seen by people like Giddens to be the more viable alternatives to it (like liberal individualism and

Ibid., p. 78 See Giddens 2002. Giddens 2000, p. 64

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Habermasian civic republicanism), we should be ready to recognize that Giddens’s preferred methods for dealing with issues tied to multiculturalism— by bracketing or outright dismissal—are not likely to do much to contribute to the establishment or maintenance of that “everyday civility that is crucial to effective public life.” ^^ This is not to say that multiculturalism as it has so far been constituted in any of its manifold forms represents an effective response to the crisis in social democracy that Giddens means, at least in theory, to confront. This is very far from the case, as will be discussed further below. But what needs to be emphasized here is that in his overriding emphasis on the importance of the knowledge economy in the “restructuring of social democratic doctrines,” coupled with his refusal to treat in any serious way those aspects of “everyday civility” and “effective public life” that relate to problems of minoritarian identity, Giddens appears to be doing far too little to acknowledge, like Leonard, that the development and exploitation of “social capital” and “cultural capital” vis a vis information technologies cannot be abstracted from the struggles over the distribution of knowledge and power regularly taking place in the context of public life, "effective” or otherwise.®^ As Castronovo and Nelson write in

For an insightful discussion from the perspective of queer theory on the limits of Habermas's political thought, see Clarke, 2-18. ^ Rosenberg's critique of Giddens' work on globalization emphasizes that one of its hallmarks is the displacement of a careful examination of the functionings of

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their critique of the depoliticization of the concept, “’soda! capital’, like all capital, is unequally distributed,” suggesting to these writers that cultural workers oriented towards the promotion of social democracy “need to intervene in that problem politically, not trust that neighborliness will help us mind it less.”®^ But in his writings about the Third Way, Giddens buries any consideration of state-administered racial inequality as a factor limiting the efficacy of “neighborliness” as a solution to the political problems he professes to want to address. The concept of rebranded British national identity articulated in a text like BritainTM exemplifies in a certain sense what Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfieid identify in their article “Multiculturalism’s Unfinished Business,” the second of the two texts on which the analysis of Natural Selection in this section centers, as the ongoing purchase of assimilationism. As a “specific ideology that sets the fundamental conditions for full economic and social citizenship in the United States” assimilationism plays an important part in allowing white domination of American political, economic, social and cultural life to persist by “downplaying the effects of

power In favor of a promotion of 'risk assessment' as a more proper aim of projects of globalizing modernity. See Rosenberg, pp. 87-156.

^ Castronovo and Nelson, p. 3; se also the critiques of Putnam's work in McLean, Schultz, and Steger

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racial marking.” ®®In colloquial terms, assimilationism would thus be about the promotion and legislation of ‘color blindness’ as the putative cultural core of the nation. Concerning the detrimental effects of this structural feature of American life, something that has been often discussed over the course of the past century in the literature on state management of cultural diversity, the writers further maintain in their singularly lucid 1996 article that as a form of treating cultural diversity with the notional design of instituting and maintaining ethical standards for cultural interaction, assimilationism continues to be the “most lethal cultural aspect of white rule”®®in that it requires different groups to follow standards they had no share In making and that they may dislike, even as it presents these standards as the bedrock of orderly freedom. These standards are very difficult to criticize because they seem inclusive, neutral and unifying rather than racial and divisive. Assimilationism is the general operating system for everybody’s different software of cultural interaction. And it is an immensely powerful opponent of all kinds of equity movements in American life.®^

The terms that the writers use to define and interrogate the ‘social technology’ of assimilationism resonate with the critical work that Mongrel does in the context of the Internet. Recalling the monopolistic marketing

Gordon and Newfieid, P. 80-1 Ibid.. p. 80 Ibid.. p. 81

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practices that provoked the anti-trust cases against Microsoft in the United States and Europe, we see in this metaphor that the operating system otherwise known as assimilationism, while ostensibly neutral and allowing

for non-coercive cultural interaction, is in actual fact not so neutral after all, but instead works as a kind of leverage used to thwart ‘the competition’, in this case equity movements, by ensuring that certain kinds of software, i.e., cultural interaction, will be more readily available and practicable than others. The forms of cultural exchange made normative in this context are the ones that depend on the acceptance of such “core” American values as Individualism and the logic of the market - values likewise reflected in

BritainTM and by and large in the Third Way - regardless of whether doing so makes it more difficult to demonstrate and counteract the problems of social inequality faced by groups of so-called racial minorities. But lest the above metaphor seem somewhat strained, let us recall that with BritainTM and Giddens’s discussions of the Third Way the authors’ promotion of certain types of cultural and social capital has so much to do with emphatically highlighting the virtues of ICTs and so little to do with

examining how particular deployments of ICTs are themselves imbricated in the processes whereby social and cultural standards that may in some cases be “racial and divisive” are installed as the “bedrock of orderly freedom.” As a result, Leonard and Giddens give little or no attention to how

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the installation and perpetuation of this kind of cultural consensus may work against the interests of those not already positioned, as a result of racial identity among other things, to take advantage of it. To put it another way, while Leonard and Giddens are no doubt not motivated by any impulse to directly oppose equity movements in British life, their work still tends to contribute to occluding consideration of how, for all the celebratory talk of innovation and creativity, the contemporary promotion of ICT-related social and cultural capital often appears to do little or nothing to address, and may even work to overshadow or counteract, the concerns of those racial justice projects that aim at reconstructing the political conditions governing the distribution of knowledge and power. Though they identify a number of problems with the forms taken by the multiculturalism of the 1990s, the most severe of which being a tendency on the part of its proponents and administrators towards ‘‘bracketing or avoiding institutional and structural determinants of

inequality,"®® Gordon and Newfieid use their article to argue for a “transformative multiculturalism” as the most viable alternative to assimilationism and the impediment it represents to a fuller realization of social equality.®® This type of multiculturalism, they explain,

ibid, p. 79

®®lbid.,p.103 99

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takes a muiticentered national culture as encompassing the intersectionality of race with a range of the identities in addition to race that comprise social life. It supports race consciousness along with antiessentialist notions of identity and social structure, and refines our understanding of the way racial and other dimensions of culture influence even apparently neutral institutions. And it puts political equality at the center of any discussion of cultural interaction

As with Natural Selection, we see here an emphasis on taking race as not only a complicated marker of identity, but also as something that needs to be pointedly factored into uses of and reflections on “apparently neutral institutions” like the Internet (with the term “institution” being used metaphorically here). The purpose for Gordon and Newfieid of this kind of cultural work, of which Mongrel’s is a good example, is to enable a critique that both de-centers the cultural dominant and contributes to establishing other, more widely distributed centers of national and transnational culture that will be more readily responsive to minoritarian demands for political equality. This kind of work would thus not stop at adapting British cultural production and the representation of British culture to the prevailing ethos of multiculturalism, in which selected emblems of empire are to be warehoused, and in which narratives of national identity that are more current and user-friendly than those of the past are to be developed while

“ Ibid.. p. 107

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effectively ignoring the political demands coming from outside the hegemonic center of cultural life. Such approaches to steering the national culture are not to be regarded, following Gordon and Newfieid as well as other scholars like Iris Marion Young and William Connolly as sufficiently ‘inclusive’ to constitute a significant departure from the pre-multiculturalist

past.®^ Instead, Gordon and Newfieid would be more likely to support the approach to multiculturalist intervention represented by Mongrel’s ‘aesthetic of cyber-diversions’, to coin a phrase. The sites that Mongrel makes available via a hack-enabled diversion of a search directory confront the user with the type of intersection of racial identity with other components of social life that these writers talk about. Crucially, this work of ‘intersectioning’ does not, in line with Gordon and Newfield’s hopeful outlining of a future direction for a race-informed, non-essentialist cultural politics, depend on a logic of deference to the cultural dominant to set the terms whereby minority racial identities might most smoothly and apolitically interface with assimilationist norms. In Natural Selection, expectations regarding both Britishness as a (white) racial category and the “whiteness of cyberspace” are relentlessly displaced.®^ Ultimately, in fact, what threads

See Young, Connolly. ^ On the social and cultural implications of white Britons’ continuing equation of Britishness with whiteness, see the Runnymede Trust’s report

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the project's network of sites together more than any dearly delineated vision of “transformative multiculturalism” (pace Gordon and Newfieid) is this impulse to displace whiteness as a privileged though often encrytpted locus around which to conceive some of the most fundamental aspects of either national culture or cyberculture. What makes the Natural Selection project singular is that this work of combating-by-displacement whiteness as ethnic hegemony is conducted via a technology, the search directory, that is typically seen as immediately and seamlessly efficient in its effects, but that in this case works by delivering the user to unforeseen and - ideally - estranging outposts. In this fashion, Mongrel’s challenge to the dominant status of whiteness is linked to and augmented by a questioning of key assumptions about the functioning of an increasingly important and prevalent information technology of the present day.

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Chapter 2 - Recasting Racial Knowledges and Cybercultural Subjectivities: Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto SIfuentes’s Temple of Confessions, Public Opinion Research, and the Cultural Politics of Internet Identity Play

Guillermo Gomez-Pena has been a figure of substantial importance in the performance art scene of the last two decades whose work has been both celebrated and taken to task for its promotion and analysis of the idea that "border crossing,” a kind of cultural work that entails creating spaces of liminality between cultures otherwise taken to be discrete, is a quintessential feature of contemporary life in North America and much of the rest of the world. In the scholarly response to his work, Homi Bhabha, for instance, seems to find Gomez-Pena's work to be compellingly emblematic of and responsive to the phenomenon of cultural hybridity\ while Saldivar and Fox suggest that whatever its virtues, some of his work tends to be deliberately obscure^ or insufficiently attentive, though much of the work deals with the specific geographical and cultural context of Mexico

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and the U.S., to the politicai economic realities bearing upon the actual border crossings undertaken by Mexican immigrants to America^ Whatever

the critical perspective taken, the best of this academic commentary has for the most part been directed towards Gomez-Pena’s works of the early 1990s like Border Brujo and Two Ufidiscovered Amerindians. The following chapter will shift focus to a more recent performance/installation/Internet art piece, Temple of Confessions, that the artist presented with his collaborator Roberto Sifuentes beginning in 1994 and that has so far received comparatively little scholarly attention. The argument will be that while not completely escaping the problems identified by critics of the earlier work, a piece like Temple of Confessions performs important cultural work by demonstrating novel points of contact between the social uses of an information technological artifact like the public opinion survey and the racial formation centering on demographic and cultural traffic moving between Mexico and the U.S. The chapter will also contend that Temple of Confessions represents a timely and in some ways trenchant critique of the “default whiteness’’ that has characterized both Internet identity experimentation and the academic literature about it.

^ Bhabha, pp. 218-9 ^ Saldivar, pp. 151-9 ®See Fox.

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The first live performance of Temple of Confessions occurred at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts in Scottsdale, Arizona, in early 1994. The piece centered its mise en scene around parodying the ethnographic diorama, with the artists drawing for iconography upon the type of religious diorama seen in Mexican colonial churches. Conceiving their performance personae as both “’cultural’ specimens and ‘holy’ creatures," Sifuentes and Gomez-Pena occupied Plexiglas museum display boxes at either end of the gallery space designated the Chapel of Desires on one side and the Chapel of Fears at the other.'^ In the former was Sifuentes in the role of “El PreColumbian Vato”, who as the name implies was ornamented or surrounded with accoutrements associated with gang members (spray can, weapons, drug paraphemalia, bloodied tank-top) and various item falling under the admittedly vague heading of ‘pre-Columbian’ exotica (intricate ‘preColumbian tattoos’, a live iguana, and a model of a fagade of a ‘preColumbian temple’ made from Styrofoam). At the other end of the space was Gomez-Pena. occupying the Chapel of Fears as “San Pocho Aztlaneca,” a “curio shop shaman for spiritual tourists.’’®His costume, a “Tex-Mex Aztec” outfit, was adorned with tribal talismans and mundane souvenirs of Mexican tourism, and the performance space of the Plexiglas box was filled with both emblems of atavistic practices like witchcraft and

Gomez-Pena 1996, p. 14

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signs of modernity like the neon light framing the altar. The artists’ performance routines involved carrying out actions like graffiti writing with spray paint, self-flagellation and fondling a gun (Sifuentes) and using a boom box radio as an instrument by fiddling with the tuner dial, drinking blood from a rubber heart and playing a child-size accordion. There was also a certain amount of improvising in line with the reactions of the audience, reactions which were fairly varied and which at least a third of the time, according to the artists, resulted in audience members offering some kind of confession either spoken into microphones placed before the Chapels or written down and deposited in an urn used for this purpose. (A third option included later phoning in a confession to a toll-free number.) Meanwhile, supplementing Sifuentes’s and Gomez-Pena’s performances were two performers (Norma Medina and Michelle Ceballos) dressed as nuns: one as a “chola/nun,” with tattoos of tears running down one of her cheeks, and the other as a “dominatrix/nun,” with goatee and garter belt. These two worked in the space in between the two chapels, doing things like cleaning the shoes of the gallery visitors with their veils or inviting confessions. Finally, the performance space included kitschy objects like a cigar shop Indian and velvet paintings depicting “other hybrid saints” like “El Transvestite Pachuco,” “La Yuppy Bullfighter,” “La Neo-primitiva,” and so

Ibid.. p. 18 106

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forth.® The performance aspect of the work took place over three days, after which the installation elements remained on display for the next few weeks. After being presented in Scottsdale, the piece was later shown in a variety of art venues throughout the U.S., including the Detroit Institute of the Arts and The Corcoran Gallery in the District of Columbia.^ Coupled with the performance/installation, which would later undergo certain modifications and be re-christened The Mexterminator Project, there was eventually an online component added to the work. Uploaded to the Internet in 1996, the Temple of Confessions Web site

(www.echonyc.com/~tempje) invites visitors to respond to a survey put together by, as the introduction to the site puts it, “two border saints from a pagan religion recently banned In the southwest [USA],” AKA Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes. These saints, we are told, “have found sanctuary here in the virtual barrio.” The survey comprises 42 questions (some of those follow-ups) in 5 sections, accessed via icons of a flying saucer; a pair of lips, fangs protruding, from which emit the continuous chatter of a “bla bla bla”; a crucifix; a picture frame that transfigures into a portrait of Frida Kahio haloed by a Uniroyal tire; and one

®Ibid., p. 19 ^ For a sample of some of the confessions delivered at or subsequent to some of the earliest performances of the "Temple," including the Scottsdale one, see Gomez-Pena 1996, pp. 43-63.

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of those grotesque traffic signs used in certain Mexico-U.S. border regions used to warn American motorists travelling along high speed routes of the possible passage of undocumented Mexican immigrants unaware of or inured to the danger of attempting to cross such treacherous motonways on foot. The segments of the survey that these demarcate are labeled, respectively, ‘Encounters (Intercultural Encounters)’, ‘Lengua/Language’, Techno-Confessional’, ‘Art/Art at the End of the Century’, and ‘Immigration’. Included among the questions are the following: “Are you currently experiencing compassion fatigue?”; “Do you think that political correctness has gone too far?”; “Do you feel that, in the 90s, reverse racism is more of a problem than white racism?”; and finally, “Do you often ask yourself, ‘whatever happened to beautiful art that everyone can appreciate?’” Clearly, the tenor of these questions, which effectively ask the respondent to choose sides in the so-called culture war between conservatives and progressives in the U.S., is in keeping with the live performance’s strategy of combining polemic, however ironically presented, and quasi-ethnographic inquiry. And indeed, upon completing the survey, the respondent submits his answers by clicking in a space labeled “Your Confession,” indicating that the survey is to be seen as an extension of the gallery performance and installation. A

further, adjunct component of the site is the ‘Graffiti’ section, at which

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visitors are encouraged to submit their remarks, signed or unsigned and with or without any direct relation to the topics addressed in the survey. In forma! terms, Temple of Confessions is quite unusual for its amalgam of live performance/installation and internet-based opinion survey. How the two parts of this aesthetic experiment are meant to be integrated, beyond the consonance of tone and theme, deserves further investigation. From Gomez-Pena’s perspective, expressed in a 1998 interview with Tilman Baumgaertel, it appears that the live performance is to be seen as the sine qua non of the Temple, “the true completion of the piece,” wherein some kind of catharsis (“purging”) may become possible for audience members encountering the “ethno-cyborgs" - in other words, the performance personae - that the artists see as somehow reflecting and challenging the “collective imagination of the net users.”®Since it is very difficult to judge whether the performances had such an effect without fairly

extensive access to the audience members themselves, and since there is perhaps reason to doubt that the presentation of such broadly satirized Latino stereotypes would have had such a challenging effect, the focus of the following discussion will be instead the question of how the overall work performs a critique of the information technologies that it engages. It is at this level, as the second and third sections of this chapter will endeavor to

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demonstrate, that we can best recognize a forma! unity in the artists’ multiply mediated presentation of the work. It is also in this area of information technology critique that the piece appears to accomplish its most important cultural work by aiming to induce audience members to critically reconsider their relation to the technologies increasingly used, in the U.S. and elsewhere, to construct and represent public opinion and personal identity.

Locating Precedents and Parallels: Temple o f Confessions In Relation to Other Works in Gomez Pena’s Oeuvre

Before working on Temple of Confessions (and a parallel work with Gomez-Pena and Native American performance artist James Luna called The Shame Man and El Mexican’t Meet the Cybervato, the Information Super-highway Bandit), Roberto Sifuentes was still something of a novice to performance and Internet art. The art career of Gomez-Pena, with whom Sifuentes began collaborating in 1993, extends back into the mid-80s when he was a central participant in the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte

Frontierzo (BAW/TAF) operating out of San Diego and Tijuana. BAW/TAF drew notice for the composition of the group, which featured both Mexican

®See Baumgaertel.

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and American artists, and for its site specific interventions around immigration issues, sometimes carried out literally on the US-Mexico border. In one of these, for example, the group invited participants from the audience to traverse the stretch of four-lane highway in San Diego (alluded to above) where undocumented immigrants from Mexico are sometimes killed as they attempt the dangerous crossing as part of their effort to make it into the U.S. After a few years of working with this group, Gomez-Pena, feeling that their work had reached an impasse, decided to leave to take up other projects in which he might pursue a less site specific agenda. Following upon an initial spell of solo performance work (the Border Brujo piece, most notably), his art would thereafter be characterized by collaborations with one or two principal partners (the performer, curator and cultural theorist Coco Fusco, along with Roberto Sifuentes, being the most important of these to date) and by the critical use of stereotyped and/or anachronistic emblems of Mexican or Chicano or indigenous peoples’ identity and culture. In the course of the 1990s, Gomez-Pena achieved a certain amount of prominence as an artist and public intellectual. Though he is at this point probably known most widely in the U.S. as a sometimes contributor to National Public Radio, as a live performer Gomez-Pena first gained real national and international prominence with a performance piece that he

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undertook with Coco Fusco beginning in the year of the quincentennia! of Columbus’s expedition to the Americas, Throughout 1992 and into 1993, Gomez-Pena and Fusco performed the piece, called Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit... (the blank to be filled in with the name of the city

where the performance took place), in premier art institutions (the Walker Center in Minneapolis and the Whitney Museum in New York), natural history museums (the Field Museum in Chicago, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and the Australian Museum of Natural History in Sydney), and in centers of urban pedestrian traffic (the Plaza Colon in Madrid and Covent Garden in London). Presenting themselves as inhabitants of the fictional island of Guatinaui, the pair performed from •

within a golden cage for three days in succession what were said to be some of the “traditional tasks” of their culture, “which ranged from sewing voodoo dolls to lifting weights to watching television and working on a laptop computer.”®Sometimes audience members would offer them food (for example, a banana) through the bars of the cage; when leaving the cage to use the bathroom, the ‘Guatinauins’ were led on a leash by one of the museum attendants. In this performance we see Gomez Pena and Fusco making very pointed use of mock archetypal personae to challenge the audience to

®See Fusco 1996. 112

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recognize the underacknowledged history of metropolitan ethnographic display of the racialized and often enough colonized other. For the artists, the most unexpected aspect of these performances was the frequency with which they played to audience members who didn’t realize that they were witnessing a kind of ethnographic hoax as history lesson, though of course so many signals indicated that this was the case. Rather than induce historically-informed shame or anger or defensiveness, then, as might have been expected, the piece frequently had the perverse effect of causing audience members to feel a relatively detached puzzlement, or in some

cases naive wonderment, about the ethnographic display of the ‘native other’. The unintended production of this effect in Two Undiscovered Amerindians, for which the artists were criticized In some quarters, is of interest here primarily for the way that it anticipates, if only by the absence thereof in this earlier project, the more directly interactive approach that would be employed in Temple of Confessions. Whether or not this factor did indeed have any bearing on the shape that the Temple eventually took, it is worth noting here that audience reticence and deferral to the authority of the medium for displaying bodies and information were not significant problems when this later work was carried out.’’° As Gomez-Pena remarks in the text that grew out of the Temple project, Sifuentes and he were

On this aspect of the Two Amerindians piece, see Fusco 1996, pp. 159-60.

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“completely unaware of the Pandora’s box [of audience response] they were about to open” when they decided to present the Temple, both as opinion survey and as live performance, to the public.^^ Among the other performance pieces within Gomez-Pena’s body of work prior to the start of his collaboration with Sifuentes, there is at least one that is markedly resonant with the Temple of Confessions project. Called Mexarcane, the piece was conducted in 1994 with Coco Fusco and involved using a marketing survey of sorts to solicit information about the consumer preferences of audiences in places like the Dufferin Mall in Toronto or the Queensway shopping centre in London. In this case the information sought by the performers had to do with the survey takers’ attitudes towards the consumption of ethnoracial exotica in the era of globalization; in order to ‘assess’ as much - there was, evidently, little interest on the part of the performers in making use of this information beyond the immediate requirements of the performance - the survey interview, which varied in composition from one participant to the next, included multiple choice questions about what sort of places the survey takers would like to visit, what sorts of food and services they like most, and what kind of gift they would prefer to receive on Valentine’s Day. The title of the piece derives from the name of the Post-NAFTA ethnic talent agency.

Gomez-Pena 1996, p. 23 11,4

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Mexarcane International, that Gomez-Pena and Fusco invented for the occasion. The aims of this organization are summed up in the following, an excerpt from one of the posters displayed onsite at the performances: Amigos, in to-day’s world a smart consumer needs an easy way to access and acquire the best of exotic culture from around the globe. Mexarcane brings you the beauty. A Simple idea. Amigos, in today’s world, a smart consumer needs an easy way to access and acquire the best of exotic cultures from around the globe. MEXARCANE INTERNATIONAL brings you the beauty and talent from faraway places at the touch of a button.

As the above would suggest and as Gomez-Pena would later write, one of the artists’ intentions in putting together Mexarcane was thus to reproduce in grotesque fashion the 'friendly tribalism’ of corporations like Benetton, Banana Republic and The Body Shop, the outlets of which are of course commonly found in shopping malls in countries like the U.S., Canada and Britain.'*^ In performing the piece, Coco Fusco sat behind a table installed at a suitable place in the shopping malls and asked the survey questions to those from among the crowd who chose to act as respondents. GomezPena, meanwhile, occupied a bamboo cage set before the table and wore a costume with elements pastiched from various Latin American cultures,

Gomez-Pena 2000, p. 84

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much in the manner of the costuming in Two Undiscovered Amerindians. The purpose of putting the survey questions to the public, ostensibly to gather information that might be used in helping Mexarcane to refine its services to match the public’s desires, was in fact to allow Fusco to appear to index the respondent’s input against an inventory of performance routines prepared by Gomez-Pena. At the conclusion of the interview, Fusco would simulate tabulating the results and proceed to classify the respondent into one of four categories. She would thereupon instruct the respondent to approach Gomez-Pena and ask him to perform Live Action

A, B, D, or O, depending on the category to which the respondent had been assigned. These Live Action routines included playing a toy violin, chanting, taking up ‘warrior poses’, and applying war paint. No explanation was provided as to why Gomez-Pena was in a cage or as to how the actions he performed were related to the personal information collected via the questionnaire. Indeed, as Fusco later explained, there was in fact no designated relation between the micro-performances and the articles of information that had supposedly called them forth.^^ As will be apparent from the initial discussion of Temple of Confessions above, the Mexarcane piece represents an earlier and in many ways compelling, though perhaps not as elaborate, part of Gomez-Pena’s

Fusco 2001b, 18-21. 116

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project to bring together survey ‘research’ and the staged performance in such a way as to invite reflection on issues related to ethnic and racial alterity in 1990s North America. By inviting audience members to take the Mexarcane marketing survey and then to witness the incongruous, performance art-diverted results flowing from the personal information they offered, the artists were able to set up a wide-ranging critique of some of the cultural and economic mechanisms whereby popular representations of Latinos are developed and disseminated. For example, Mexarcane International evinced a concern to contest efforts to depoliticize 1980s and 90s pluralism in the art world. Gomez-Pena and Fusco sought to critically reframe what the literature scholar and arts administrator Thomas Ybarra Frausto, writing about Chicano art in the 1980s, characterizes as the “supermarketlike array of choices among styles, techniques and contents” suddenly available to art publics from artists, including Chicanos and other ‘ethnics’, newly ‘recognized’ under the rubric of pluralism in that period Though this pluralist impulse may have been directed against some of the most perniciously exclusivist tendencies in the American art world, YbarraFrausto explains that the notionally wider creative latitude enjoyed by previously marginalized Chicano artists hopeful of attaining greater recognition of their work during the art world’s ‘multicultural moment’ was

See Ybarra-Frausto.

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predicated on their work’s remaining legible and marketable within the broadly reductive categories (use of bright colors, folkloric themes, ‘festive’ flourishes) conventionally understood to definitively characterize ‘ethnic’ art. The impact of this narrowly configured pluralism was often to contain or recuperate the expression of the identity-based demands for social and cultural justice that this work in many cases reflected and to “deflect antagonisms’’ of this type rather than allow them to be seen as the focus of such cultural work. Mexarcane responds to the problem Ybarra-Frausto outlines. The ‘ethnic talent’ - read Latino artist - that Gomez Pena is seen to embody and Fusco to administer in Mexarcane is constrained to perform according to expectations and routines grotesquely mismatched to the actual concerns, both aesthetic and political, its representatives might wish to address were they not limited to manifesting “the type and amount of diversity that feels right” (to quote from the Mexarcane marketing brochure). Mexarcane offers this state of affairs as something like the logical outcome of a pluralism that induces minoritarian artists, with their newly available though still quite limited access to larger art markets in the 1980s and 90s, to produce work satisfying the contemporary demand for a ‘comfortably exotic’ object of representation. In this connection, Kobena Mercer ironically terms an analogous state of affairs in aesthetic production in Britain “multicultural normalization," pointing out that the mainstreaming

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of British black artists has entailed “a gradua! decoupling of political empowerment and cultural visibiiity,”’'® In both cases, marginally greater access on the part of minoritarian artists to increased visibility in the art world, such as it is, has been accompanied by an apparent diminution of concern among art world institutions and players to address ongoing problems, both internal to fine arts fields and more widely cast in social fields, related to racialization. Along with this critical take on the status of the minoritarian artist in the late twentieth century art world, Mexarcane offered a sharply parodic staging of the ever burgeoning, increasingly profitable phenomenon of Latino marketing. During the 1990s, a period of heightened targeting of Latinos by marketers in the U.S. (as well as politicians and others concerned to direct a now increasingly pluralistic public opinion), it may have been imagined that this unprecedented ‘recognition’ would forthwith translate into substantive gains for those so recognized in terms of political equality. At very least, the problem of Latinos’ minimal visibility within American popular culture had been surmounted, or so the 1999 Newsweek magazine cover article on the ‘Latin explosion’ would have seemed to suggest. Against such sanguine interpretations of Latino chic, however, were much warier observations about how this kind of collective emergence

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within U.S. popular culture might be hindered by certain nagging realities of history and poiitical economy. As Arlene Davila has shown In a recent text devoted to the cultural logic and politics underlying the business of Latino marketing in the USA, racialized others like Mexicans and Chicanos continue to be ‘recognized’ in America principally through the lens of a pluralism poorly gauged to account for their fundamental contributions to making and perpetually remaking American cultural, social and political life. Constructing the ‘marketable Latino’, Davila demonstrates, has involved bracketing the experiences and concerns of those among the Latino population who are in the marketing and advertising industries’ reckoning “’complicated’, bilingual, bicultural, perhaps polluted’’ in favor of a narrowly configured understanding of “the immigrant and Spanish-dominant Hispanic...as the one who constantly reviews the market, who gives it its cultural qualities and who...is most easily sold to corporate America.”’®The consequences of this overriding focus on the ‘coherence’ of marketing campaigns, however expediently contrived, at the expense of an acknowledgment of the complexities of “life on the hyphen” are substantial. Beyond merely inaccurately reflecting the lives of the people who are its object, this kind of project has serious implications for American political life. Ultimately, Davila maintains, by “constructing a Hispanic market that is

Davila, p. 150

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easily marketable - that remains safe, authentic, and ready for mass consumption ~ the [marketing] industry ends up erasing the historical roots of Latinos in the United States that arise from its very foundation, invalidating the political claims of Latino populations that are an intrinsic rather than an external or recently incorporated segment of the U.S. population.”^^ In other words, the process of smoothly contouring the Latino market for the American or transnational corporate client extends and exacerbates the tendency already there in American political life to under-

acknowledge or ignore altogether the host of historical and cultural factors respective of which Latinos might expect to find full, uncompromised inclusion within the American body politic.''® Though the work was never actually presented in the U.S., Mexarcane can be seen as an intervention meant to raise questions about the ethical implications of this effect of Latino marketing. The work offers the spectacle of ‘ethnoracial talent’, which we might also read in this context as the ‘marketable Latino’, as an artifact meant strictly for consumption, something/someone with no organic connection to the historical and

Ibid., p. 152 Moreover, as Davila points out, by marking the ethnic talent as primarily 'culturar rather than, for example, ‘raced’ or ‘gendered’, Latino marketing a la the Mexarcane marketing questionnaire becomes a way of bracketing the array of differences within and across Latino populations that may have to do with coordinates of identity not immediately or exclusively reducible to cultural styles.

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ongoing formation of the dominant culture, the lack of which connection renders it/her a kind of electively admissible supplement thereto. As the Mexarcane marketing brochure puts it to the Canadian, or British, or above ail overdeveloped world consumer, “With you making the choices [about what kind of ethnic talent to ‘import’], you can feel safe knowing your own culture and environment is being protected.” What is important to recognize in this pungently ironic version of the multicultural marketing come-on is the

implicit dismissal of the interests and agency of the ‘ethnic talent’, whose place in the dominant culture - and following Davila, whose full political entitlement - is understood to be never more than provisional. Choices about Latino cultural dispositions and styles may be left to the safe, generic ‘Hispanic’ consumer or Latino marketer to make, but the only ones empowered to make choices about where and how to situate these components of culture, embodied and expressed in this case by the ‘ethnic talent’, in the wider context of English-first America are the ‘non-ethnic’ consumers who avail themselves, “with the touch of a button,” of the creative skills of these “talented beings.” For these latter, no already existing, indeed longstanding political stake in the composition and conduct of the dominant culture is recognized: outside of the range of capacities

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related to their (necessariiy ethnoracial/cultural) talent, they can claim no secure position in the culture into which they are to be marketed. The degree to which a technology of information like the marketing survey can be used to facilitate such an outcome is in some ways the critical focus of Mexarcane. As such, the piece echoes and elaborates on the observation of Davila that through Latino marketing “Latinos are continually recast as authentic and marketable, but ultimately as a foreign rather than intrinsic component of U.S. society, culture and history, suggesting that the growing visibility of Latino populations parallels an expansion of the technologies that render them exotic and invisible.”’*® Again, it is a question of seeing how key Latino contributions to and political investments in American social and cultural life over the course of the last two centuries are made to recede into the historical background or disappear altogether at the very same time as the consumer and lifestyle choices around the look and feeling of the ‘marketable Latino’ are multiplied. The manner of collecting personal information from the consuming public that is particular to Mexarcane International helps to spotlight how Latino populations are made “exotic” and “invisible” by isolating ‘ethnic talent’ consumption from any consideration of the ways in which Latino cultural concerns and styles are already imbricated with rather

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than intrinsically alien to those of the dominant culture (in the U.S., in any case). In Mexarcane this point is emphasized by virtue of the fact that Gomez-Pena’s “exotic antics” bear no relation to any of the information that the questionnaire respondents provided to Fusco. The former’s culturalproduction-on-demand is in no discernible way indexed to whatever any individual consumer may or may not know about Mexican or Chicano cultures, via membership in and/or proximity to and/or affinity for and/or aversion to these or to any of their elements. This is important because it suggests that the type of the marketable Latino constructed for mass consumption ultimately depends, notwithstanding adamant avowals to the contrary within the Latino marketing industry, on a relationship of nondialogic exteriority, if not total marginality, to the dominant culture. The fact that there is no overlap between the information the questionnaire respondents offer and Gomez-Pena’s displays of ethnic talent does not indicate that the latter possesses autonomy vis a vis the process of performing ‘his’ culture, which is in any case never specifically identified. He is, after all, in a cage and his performances are carried out on demand. This disconnect between the questionnaire and the performance instead testifies to the ways that Latinos’ already extant and vital involvement in American

Davila, p. 4 124

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society and culture are, as Davila maintains, made to seem intrinsically alien, both “exotic” (outside and recognizable) and “invisible” (inside and unrecognizable), via the deployment and operation of, among other things, the information technologies of marketing. The marketing survey a la Mexarcane can indeed configure a Latino body/image for consumption at the shopping mall; by refusing to permit the survey takers to recognize anything of themselves in their chosen object of consumption, however, Gomez-Pena and Fusco hoped in their performances to force consideration of precisely what was inadmissible in their mock information technological production of the ‘marketable Latino’: that is, the ‘already there but missing’, meaning the existence in America and elsewhere of long and often massively fraught histories of subordination of racial and ethnic minorities that precede and militate against their spontaneous, information technology-enabled production as newly “authentic and marketable” for the

2

century.

Pefform ing New Routes into Public Opinion

One of the key features of a work like Mexarcane, then, is that it routes around its users’ preferences in order to press them to confront the

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national historical omissions and distortions bearing upon the way that consumer choices tend to be directed within the ethnic marketing industry. One criticism that might be made of this approach to challenging the audience for Mexarcane is that by so decisively limiting the audience members’ role in responding in any more immediate way to the adjunct of U.S. ethnocentrism and racialization that Latino marketing has, at least in part, so far been, Gomez-Pena and Fusco might thereby lead those audience members to feel nothing more than a reduced investment in the outcome of their own interventions. That is to say, by providing so little space for the subjective and possibly complicated reactions of audience members to their role as objects or targets of such marketing campaigns, by so insisting on the force of ethnic marketing to decisively shape this particular sector of the national imaginary, Mexarcane would almost appear to reinforce, rather than seriously contest, the notion that any resistance to such symbolic violence is bound to remain weak, ineffective and marginalized. This point won’t be pursued here vis a vis Mexarcane, but it is worth asking to what degree such a criticism might also apply to Temple of Confessions. At first glance it would certainly seem that the artists engage in a similar imposition of a problematic in their Temple of Confessions survey (as well as in their live performances). Though the piece does solicit a

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relatively direct audience involvement, it could easily be seen, based on the aspect of its representational economy that involves the use of absurd stereotypes, as ultimately uninterested in the ways that audiences interpret the material they are confronted with. The next part of the discussion will give further consideration to whether this is really the case and whether the strategy of presenting survey questions in Temple of Confessions, which might be seen to assume on the part of the survey respondents either a starkly phobic rejection of the racial other or a knowingly ironic selfconsciousness about the ways that racism operates, is thus ill-adapted to soliciting nuanced discussion about the role of race in American life. After all, it is probably more likely the case that some respondents, probably in fact a substantial number of them, would hold views that do not accord neatly or entirely with either one of these dispositions. From a certain perspective, then, the artists would be subject to the accusation that so far from issuing any real challenge to their audiences to re-examine U.S. racialization and some of its contexts (for instance, immigration from the South), they instead promote uncritical reproduction of the array of extant assumptions regarding what ‘racial knowledge’ looks like and what types of subjectivity may emerge in relation to it. On my own reading, indeed, there is some limited basis for this criticism. But the principal argument here will be that this view of the work, while not wholly without foundation, is

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insufficient to the extent that it concentrates too heavily on the work’s presentation of grotesque stereotypes or somewhat loaded survey questions at the expense of carefully examining another of its important features: its engagement with the performativity of the survey as an artifact of information technology. The rest of this section will try to show that in their use of Temple's Internet-based opinion survey the artists offer not simply a broad parody of the survey form but also a forum for the re­

examination of certain aspects of 'racial knowledge' as it is encoded within 'public opinion’. In this regard it may be useful to look for a moment at another recently produced artifact of race and information technologies that employed a similar approach to engaging its audience. The NAACP’s 2003 National Survey on Race, Gender and Equality in America was delivered to the home of a friend of mine in an envelope on which was printed the following: QUESTION: Are aggressive blacks and pushy women threatening America’s superiority? Inside, the questionnaire contained queries that appeared to be geared less towards confronting the respondent with remarks of this type, safely classified in the category ‘phobic’, than towards helping the organization to strategize around issues like the ongoing attack on affirmative action (the respondent is explicitly asked whether he would vote for a ban on the policy) and the

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consequences of the Patriot Act (though it is not so named in the survey, one of the questions tries to get at whether the respondent views this law as a legitimate response to the events of September 11, 2001 and their long­ term upshot). Why, then, would the question on the envelope have been put to the respondent in such a way as to ask him not to address any particular issue or set of issues but rather to directly and explicitly avow or disavow a blatantly racist and sexist standpoint? The accompanying fundraising letter under the signature of Julian Bond, the longtime civil rights activist who serves as the organization’s chair, explains that in the current political climate in the U.S. "the historic and ongoing quest for equality is today threatened by a distorted, nostalgic view of what the ‘real’ America was like before all these ‘troublemakers’ came along” - the troublemakers being, in this case, the “aggressive blacks” and “pushy women” referred to on the envelope. Bond’s letter points out that “politicians and demagogues proclaim and reinforce the yearning for an imaginary yesterday with a blitz of factual distortions,” with the result that “public opinion polls...show that an increasing number of white Americans believe racial minorities are less than equal human beings, lacking in thrift, morality, industriousness and patriotism.” In response, the letter asserts the following: It is time to set the record straight Time for caring people like you and me, who know the difference, to speak out [emphasis in the

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original]. That is why I am enclosing for you the NAACP’s 2003 National Survey on Race, Gender and Equality in America. This survey will collect the opinions of a wide variety of Americans on the vital human rights issues of today. Your answers will give the NAACP added ammunition in our battle to regain the high ground.

This is followed by the request: “Please take a few moments to complete the survey and return it to me. By doing so, you will help send a strong message to panderers and demagogues that people of conscience are saying, ‘ENOUGHV” [emphasis in the original]. It is never made fully apparent In the letter just how the results of the NAACP’s survey might be used to rectify the problems that the letter identifies. Indeed, nothing in the survey implies that specific concerns about racist stereotyping or the demagogic misrepresentation of the American past are liable to be addressed on the basis of the results that it generates. But it is also quite clear that the capacity of the polls that the letter references to serve as meaningful indices of the depth of racist sentiment in America is seen to be suspect. The white American respondents to these polls who profess racist attitudes have been misled by those who stand to profit in some way from their resentment of the equality claims put forth by racial minorities. As a result, the responses of white Americans in polls dealing with social issues related to diversity cannot be credited as

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authentically derived from the respondents’ experiences with negotiating race or racism.^® Whether or not the actual source of the popular racism reflected by the opinion polls mentioned in the letter is political manipulation is not

something that can be adequately addressed in the limited space available here. Certainly the aim of much of the scholarship in cultural studies in the last two or three decades has been to complicate our understanding of the nature and mechanics of hegemony so that the public is not seen to be always ready to be led by elites and the culture industry into (or further into) ‘false consciousness’ of the type summoned up by the letter’s characterization of the survey respondents in question.^'' It is also worth adding that alongside the opinion poll results pointed to by the NAACP there have been others that might indicate something of an abatement in popular racism, though David Roediger is certainly correct to call into question the readiness of certain commentators to use these poll results as

^ The use of an opinion survey in a fundraising campaign by a social advocacy group is not at all novel, and at least one example of the type of demagoguery denounced in the NAACP’s letter was itself cast in the form of a survey. The historian Ramon Gutierrez reports that in a 1989 fundraising campaign by the American Immigration Control Foundation the group submitted an opinion survey to potential donors. The survey question were of the following xenophobic kind; “Which of the problems associated with illegal aliens are the most personally disturbing to you?” Possible responses included “bilingual public education, bring in diseases like AIDS, loss of jobs for American citizens, drug trafficking, and crime” (Gutierrez p. 258).] For the classic statement about ‘oppositional readings’, see Hall 1980.

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conclusive evidence of such a decline and, further, to maintain that any such deciine would constitute the effective equivalent of the emergence of a greater degree of racial Justice in American society?^ In any case, what is more apposite to consider in this context is the strategy that the NAACP takes in its use of the opinion survey as a counterweight to what the organization sees (at least according to the fundraising letter) as its principal political opposition; the right wing politicians and demagogues who are said to bear responsibility for some if not all of the racism expressed in certain public opinion polls. The purpose of asking the public to respond to the survey is not simply to gather information that can help the NAACP to refine its organizational goals and methods, as one might have been tempted to assume before reading the accompanying letter. Nor is it, as might otherwise be surmised, to provide a more accurately rendered version of public opinion about racial matters than has been supplied by those polls that the letter dismisses as tainted by ideological distortion. Notwithstanding the letter’s call to “set the record straight,” its appeal to “people of conscience” to “send a strong message to panderers and demagogues” suggests that the poll is not meant to “collect the opinions of a wide variety of Americans on the vital human rights issues of today” in some strictly objective sense.

^ Roediger, p. 12

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This is not a typical opinion survey, then, in the sense that it does not appear to rely on maintaining the semblance of scientism. With the supplement of the letter’s exhortation to “send a strong message” to those perceived to be the beneficiaries of racism in political terms (without its being defined in any kind of specific way what that message ought to be), the survey becomes a different manner of forum for the expression of the respondents’ views. Rather than set her up as an object of knowledge gathering whose views on race can supposedly be instrumentally slotted into a non-ideologlcal representation of public opinion - in other words, as the survey respondent conceived wholly in the abstract - the combined effect of the letter and the survey is to interpellate the reader/respondent, whether she be black, white or otherwise, as a subject of the NAACP’s campaign to “create an impenetrable bond of solidarity among women and men of all races - White, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians and all others,” as the fundraising letter puts it. What the appearance of utopian language of this sort would suggest is that so far from restricting its own opinion survey to providing data meant to correct the misunderstandings of those white members of the public who have been deceived about various matters by practitioners of demagoguery, the NAACP means to adopt the survey to a rhetorical, performative purpose that aims beyond these more limited ends. The

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opinion sun/ey’s principal function is typically understood to be that of allowing for a construction of a database that can be indexed for scholarly and popular interpretation of the respondents’ attitudes about various topics. The manner in which such a database is constructed is taken to be a matter of strictly technical concern, with little bearing, at least in any lasting sense, on the subjectivity of those who choose to participate.^® But in the NAACP's project the announcement of an intention to create such a database serves instead as a collectivizing vehicle used to route together, albeit in a utopian fashion tending to gloss over some of the attendant complications, anti-racist sympathies and energies that might otherwise be harder to bring together towards a broadly-cast articulation of racial solidarity. Another way of saying this is that in the NAACP’s project a social collective with a utopian orientation is (meant to be) summoned up in part through the very construction of a public opinion database, albeit a database assembled without the pretense of social scientific neutrality behind it. What matters in this alternative scenario is that the respondents are invited to see the construction of the database as in and of itself poiitical and performative rather than as somehow, by virtue of a certain positivism, free of any such orientations, and that as respondents their role is not

See Koven’s discussion of this historically prevalent view and the recent feminist

and post-structuralist critique of it. 134

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limited to supplying information but has instead a more properly subjective dimension. With this in mind, it will perhaps be less difficult than it might otherwise seem to reconcile the aforementioned use of utopian language with the polemical tone of the question that appears on the exterior of the envelope. The explanation for this juxtaposition should begin with the acknowledgment that the presentation of a racist stereotype like “aggressive blacks" in the form of the survey question is not meant simply to ‘expose’ a particular node of the racist imaginary, or even to draw focus to a particular weapon in the ideological arsenal of right wing demagogues. Rather, the presentation of the question seems to assume on the part of the reader/respondent a fairly ready familiarity with, and perhaps though not necessarily an equally ready antagonism towards, the kind of reactionary discourse that the question is meant to travesty. Likewise, the relatively loaded tone of the question about the role of women’s and African Americans’ unwonted aggression in pursuing social and cultural equality in the US, with its imagined consequences for American “superiority,” does not work merely to ironize and counter the all too prevalent tendency to assign the blame for any upheaval in American life following on a half century and more of movements seeking redress for racial- and genderbased injustice to those who attempt to actively assert the rights secured as

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a result of the achievements of these movements. Of course, the question does have this effect, there is a counter-discursive move being made here, but it is important to appreciate that this kind of rejoinder to the longstanding resentment of and resistance to the civil rights movement and its variegated legacies did not have to take the form of an ironically conceived survey question. This kind of rhetorical move could very well have been carried out in more straightforward fashion. The fact that it wasn’t suggests that we need to pay careful attention to how the irony is meant to work here. It is important to see that the form that this particular anti-racist intervention takes, its conveyance in the form of such a survey question, matters very much to the overall meaning of projects like this one and Temple of Confessions. There are important differences between the two, without doubt. With the former, for instance, it obviously has to be recognized that for institutional reasons a fundraising letter for a social advocacy group always tends to be oriented towards rhetorically mobilizing the letters’ recipients to support the organization, adopt its positions, and act in accord with its aims. Still more importantly, the fundraising letter may invoke solidarity among the members of various racialized groups, but with its use of a term like “Hispanics” (for instance) it does little to draw attention to the problems underlying the way those groups have been constructed as readily ‘legible’ within meaningfully discrete boundaries despite the many

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theoretical and sociologica! obstacles militating against this kind of gigantically broad coliectivization. A!! of this would not work in the same way with Temple o f Confessions, the creators of which also seem less favorably disposed to according white people access to a bond of racial solidarity (“impenetrable” or otherwise) in the absence of the letter’s undergoing a process of “unlearning privilege," to use Gayatri's Spivak’s term for systematic efforts at renouncing and critiquing the prerogatives of

whiteness.^"^ But in both cases we see the same movement to combine an ironic deployment of the information technological artifact that is the opinion survey with a self-professed utopian impulse to construct and consolidate a viably and expansively anti-racist discursive space. The preceding, somewhat protracted discussion of the cultural politics of the NAACP’s survey campaign has been designed to show that this intervention manages, aside from its more immediate organizational aims and whatever its conceptual problems, to invite the respondent to 1. see herself as directly implicated in contemporary racial projects in the U.S. and 2. recognize that any route through 'public opinion' to greater racial justice will necessarily involve a racially broad-based willingness to critically confront and redress the limitations and deformations of the sociallyinserted technologies that mediate racial knowledge. The latter point is one

See Spivak.

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that has been framed here as utopian, in that its realization would depend on a thoroughgoing, if not indeed truly massive, work of social transformation. Couched as it is in its own version of the language of racial solidarity/redemption - with its ‘border saints’ set in place to hear confessions of ‘multiracial sins’ - Temple o f Confessions gives the suggestion of being aimed at organizing a kind of utopian response to both popular racism (whether of a type directly abetted by right-wing demagoguery or in a more diffuse form) and to the use of the opinion survey as an information technology that in many cases serves to confine its ‘users’ in ideological frameworks that foreclose rather than elicit interventions rooted in their situated experiences of social life. By doing as much, the artists work to re-situate their audience not only in relation to the discourse of race but also to the information technological processes of mediation, both journalistic and social scientific, whereby features of racial knowledge are rendered as ‘social facts’. Focusing on the established methods in social science research for posing survey questions, Bourdieu notes in an essay of three decades ago that the formal abstraction characterizing the process lends itself to the respondents’ seeing it as only tenuously connected to their actual understanding of particular issues and that the “the opinion poll would be closer to reality if it totally violated the rules of objectivity and gave people

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the means to situate, themselves as they really do in real practice.”^® For Bourdieu, then, the problem with typical attempts to measure “public opinion” has largely to do with the fact that the polling process tends to methodologically preclude poll respondents’ subjectivity from bearing meaningfully on their responses.^® in his later work, Bourdieu made a pointed, indeed impassioned effort to develop other ways of accessing and elucidating the practical knowledge of the ethnographic informants whom his research engaged. Such work, he explained in an essay on methodology accompanying a monumental research project on "social suffering" that he directed in the 1990s^^, abandons the pretense of scientific objectivity and neutrality, for it is precisely by leaving things alone, abstaining from any intervention and ail construction, that one falls into error; the terrain is then free for preconstructions or for the automatic effects of social mechanisms at work in even the most elementary scientific operations (conception and formulation of questions, definition of categories for coding, etc.). Only active denunciation of the tacit presuppositions of common sense can

Bourdieu 1979, pp. 127-8 ^ For an excellent example of how this problem works in practice, see Patrick Champagne’s article in the Bourdieu-edited volume The Weight of the World. Bourdieu 1999, pp. 607-626

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counter the effects of all the representations of social reality to which both interviewer and interviewee are continually exposed.^®

This kind of approach to taking account of public opinion, something which Bourdieu characterizes as both a "spiritual exercise" (in that it turns research into a necessarily committed effort to 'know the other') and a "realist construction," would thus seek to locate its subjects as possessors of a complex, not easily indexed body of knowledge about the various features of social life. Key to attempts at indexing this knowledge is, for Bourdieu, that the interviewee's subjectivity not be seen, despite the social and disciplinary pitfalls liable to produce such a result, as readily collated with the dictates of received wisdom. Rather, the knowledge that the informant brings to the sociological construction of public opinion is to be understood as already complexly formed in relation to his or her practical experience, and at the same time susceptible to (re)elaboration within the de-mystifying framework of a properly engaged research method. Such a method allows both the researcher and the respondent the luxury of performing a mutually pursued “construction” that meaningfully reflects the surrounding social reality, instead of simply reiterating the “tacit presuppositions of common sense."

Ibid., p. 620

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Now in the case of Temple o f Confessions, the fact that the survey is connected to a cel! to do something as relatively unusual as ‘confessing multicultural sins’ is obviously not geared towards allowing the majority of respondents to speak from a place that is squarely grounded in their quotidian experience. Whether or not the survey respondents actually see such a prompt as an invitation to express more frankly their beliefs or opinions about any of the topics that the Temple’s survey deals with, the conceit of the piece would seem to be that the respondents are offered an opportunity to instead step outside of their “real practice,” this being understood for our purposes as consisting of the discursive routines and contexts, whatever they may be, in which they typically address their concerns about racial alterity and related matters. But despite these differences between what Bourdieu seemed to have in mind in his research program and the mode of cultural work carried out in Temple, there is nevertheless an important connection, aside from their framing as "spiritual exercises," between the former’s call for re-setting opinion research so as to more fully and readily encompass respondents’ subjectivity-in-elaboration and the latter’s movement to use the survey to estrange and/or enable the respondents’ interventions in publicly-conducted practical considerations of the effects and implications of multiculturalism, both as cultural policy and as everyday reality.

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This connection can be most clearly indicated by looking at one of the questions from the Temple survey. The question, “When was the last time you slept with an illegal alien?” is one of the more provocative, and perhaps incongruent with the respondent’s expectations, that the survey offers. There is, of course, mordant irony in the suggestion that the respondent might think about any such sexual experience principally in terms that classify the partner in line with his or her immigration status. Power is represented in this equation by the capacity of the survey respondent (who is presumed to not be an undocumented migrant himself or herself) to unilaterally delimit the forms and meanings of contact with the national/racial other, all the while liberally enjoying the various benefits to be derived from this contact (though here more in terms of physical intimacy than of low wage labor, as is more generally the case). But beyond serving to address this crucial point about transnational racial and sexual politics, a survey question such as this one might also be seen as working to move the respondent out of a frame of reference wherein undocumented migrants are asked about - or indeed reported about - solely with respect to whether or to what extent they are a “problem” for American society. This kind of straitening of what concerns via a vis ‘illegal aliens’ can be articulated under the rubric of public opinion resonates with Bourdieu’s analysis to the degree that where such ‘illegals' are concerned it is seldom a question of

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trying to find out about what kinds of substantive, practical interactions the pubiic have actually had with those named and stigmatized by this term. Getting outside the “public opinion” frame of reference in this case would therefore involve re-visiting one’s assumptions about the modes of inquiry, the opinion survey among them, via which ‘illegal immigrants' are constructed and consumed as an ideological artifact around which can be maintained, though never without countervailing efforts at decoding and critique, a certain hegemonic version of national and racial identity.^® Without leaving aside the question of how power differentials structure border crossing as cultural contact, the survey question we are looking at invites the respondent to consider what it would mean to conceive of undocumented migrants in some kind of more effectively relational sense, so that rather than focusing on “policing the crisis”^ he or she might come to see these fellow inhabitants of the USA (whether permanent or

otherwise) as carrying out lives that are practically and intersubjectively bound up with his or her own. Seeing as much would thus entail possibilities for the respondent to reassess and revise his or her investment

I.e., the kind that Davila interrogates for its erasure of longstanding historical contributions of Latinos, including economic migrants both “illegal” and otherwise, to the American culture and polity. ^ U.S.-based anti-immigration web sites are rife on the Internet, as even a cursory inspection of the results of a Google search on "illegal immgration" will demonstrate. It is characteristic of these sites to make extensive and, needless to

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in forms of life that depend on erasing, precluding or marginalizing this type of cultural contact.^'' Ultimately, neither the live performance nor the survey component of

Temple is concerned merely to promote a particular understanding of or overarching perspective on the effects of multicuituralism. The artists’ efforts at presenting a minoritarian counterdiscourse are inflected, sometimes heavily, with an irony meant to deflect any simplistic reading off of their ‘message’. At the same time, there is a utopian element in the work that takes seriously the notion that the construction of databases meant to give shape and meaning to the opinions of publics might as part of the knowledge gathering process afford some genuine opportunity for participants to perform and elaborate their subjectivity, whether in direct contiguity with “real practice” or in looser conjunction with hope-informed visions of and claims on possible alternatives to the racialized status quo. In Temple, the opinion questionnaire thereby comes to serve as a site wherein participants are invited to explore and augment their capacities to ‘read’ race as it is mediated by the information and communication technologies

say, selective use of data from public opinion polls to bolster their case for toughening U.S. immigration policy. Bonnie Honig's analysis of the symbolic status of the immigrant in the U.S. is devoted to showing that "Americans are so used to thinking about foreigners as either a poison or a cure for the diseased national body that they are poorly porepared to think of them simply as persons. This poor preparation is captured by the dehumanizing American term for foreigners: 'alien.'" See Honig 2002.

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that play such a large part in rendering up ‘the public’ as both an object of knowledge and a ground for politica! contestation. This kind of re-purposing of the questionnaire would also seem designed to include critical space for participants to reassess in a more global way their ‘lay theories’ about the significance of ‘public opinion,’®^ In this sense, Temple sets out to accomplish something similar to what another ‘survey art’ project, the painters and conceptual artists Komar and Melamid’s The People’s Choice, aims to do. Writing about this project, in which the painters issued an opinion survey to participants in thirteen countries and on the Internet about, among other things, their preferences in a painting (color, size, contents, etc.) and then painted the results for gallery and online display, Andrew Ross has suggested that the artists wanted to offer “a cunning invitation in the way of a direct challenge - if not this, then what?”^ Ross is primarily concerned with seeing The People’s Choice in terms of how its ironic commentary on the immersion of art in consumer culture bears upon communication between artists and “public communities,” but with Temple of Confessions the challenge that GomezPena and Sifuentes present goes beyond such a concern to elicit further thinking about how an artifact of information technology like the public

See Herbst. Ross 1998b, p. 161

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opinion poll, now more prevalent than ever with the growth of the Internet, can work to distort, via certain of its social functionings, the composition of the public so that minoritarian interests and political claims are held out of view. It is this problem that the Temple artists want to provoke their audiences to consider with the hope of conceiving alternatives; the “then what?" that Ross’s question submits.^ The use of the survey their own work pursues does not itself offer any clear alternative of this type, but it does pointedly invoke, in a somewhat utopian manner, the notion that via a minoritarian-initiated confrontation with the effects and consequences of racialization a truly inclusive pubiic might begin to reclaim some of the racially inequitable political and cultural space that 'public opinion' now marks out.

Politicizing Cyber-Play

The preceding section was devoted to examining the strategies employed by Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes in their critical use of the opinion survey. These strategies involve deploying the survey not simply as an

^ The Komar and Melamid essay appears in Ross’s book. Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice. Another essay in this text on the politics of public culture, “The Great American Numbers Game”(1998a), is also relevant to the discussion here.

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instrument arranged to collect Information but instead as part of a minoritarian-engineered challenge to culturally dominant iterations of public opinion that serve, whether directly or more obliquely, to undergird some of the more pernicious racial projects of the day. The analysis pursued in both the previous section and the first one focused primarily on how GomezPena’s work (with Sifuentes and others) intervenes in such racial projects in order to contribute to rearticulating or derailing them. In what follows the discussion will turn towards a consideration of how Temple also engages with the contemporary construction of identity in technocultures to critique the work of racialization, in many cases encrypted, as it plays out in such cultural formations. There will be a focus on the way that Temple, to the

degree that it affords opportunities for its audience to intersubjectively 'work on' their racial identities in the context of the Internet, bears upon the discourse and practice of online role playing, a key phenomenon in the evolution of cybercultures. The contention will be that Temple o f

Confessions works as a commentary on the tendency within technocultural sites like MUDs to avoid confronting the consequences of racialization as it relates to how cyber-identities are imagined, maintained, and talked about.

Further, the aim will be to show that the Temple represents an alternative manner of addressing the performance of identity in cybercultures, an approach that is notable for being attentive to and to a certain extent

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corrective of the problem of leaving racial identity unmarked and unexamined vis a vis this kind of technologically-enabled self-fashioning. To demonstrate how Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes’s work responds in certain respects to the most widely available models of identity play on the Internet, the next several pages will attempt to reckon with some of the paradigm-shaping implications of Sherrie Turkle’s work, with a focus on her well-known text Life on the Screen. In addition to constituting something of

a high water mark in 1980s and early 90s cyberculture scholarship for its foundation, still fairly singular at the time, in empirically-grounded studies of the cultures of computing rather than in loose speculation about the impending displacement of life as we know it by the technological effects of “virtual reality,” Turkle’s work has been, along with that of Donna Haraway, the most frequently cited in the literature. Though in certain quarters there has been doubt expressed about the utility of her scholarship for elucidating some of the wider dimensions of the cultural work of cyberspace, for the most part her work has been treated as a kind of bedrock for discussions of identity experimentation on the Internet.^® The ensuing discussion of Turkle’s ideas and their purchase in cyberculture scholarship will not in any way put into question the well-established notion, for which she is to a great

Lisa Nakamura’s reading of Turkle's work in her book Cybertypes is one example of a largely critical take on the latter’s approach to explaining cybercultural identity work.

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degree to be credited, that the Internet is an important context for the contemporary exploration of the expressive potentials and limits of personal/multiple identity. Rather, the question that will be asked about Turkle’s work vis a vis Temple o f Confessions is, given the former’s recognition about the connection between the Internet and identity experimentation, to what extent does this work conduce to careful consideration of the role of race and cultural politics in the execution of such experimentation? Doing so will partly depend on understanding how Turkle’s critique of identity with reference to the concept of virtuality fits into the overall examination of cyberspace that has taken place in recent years. McPherson notes in an article published in 2000 that a large share of new media theory has been devoted to portraying cyberspace as a milieu in which the most salient forms of practice involve “rewriting the standard of the bounded, embodied individual.”^ She connects this approach to addressing cyberculture, which she finds to be questionable in the way that it tends to under-emphasize the work of examining how online practices articulate with pre-existent, non-virtual forms of life, to the work of Turkle and Stone, primarily because they are two of the most prominent people in the field to have written with such an orientation; certainly, however, the

® McPherson, p. 118

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same couid be said about a great many other scholars.^^ It is also true that there has been a fair amount of criticism and/or qualification of such perspectives.^® Notwithstanding the fact that there is a certain amount of resistance to the notion that cyberspace practices effectively re-draw the contours of embodied experience, it is at the same time important to understand that Turkle’s work has so far been read in contexts, both in lay cultures and in some precincts of academia, where many have been predisposed to conceiving of the Internet as facilitative of a radical transformation in the manner whereby identities are engendered and given shape. Though she is herself more circumspect, at least for the most part, about the implications of the Intemet for the recasting of identity and the body, the almost inevitable connection of her work to this tendency to overread the effects of prosthetic communication on identity formation and maintenance can lead to a certain amount of unfortunate conceptual slippage. In such circumstances, a seemingly innocuous statement in Life on the Screen like, “In the real-time communities of cyberspace, we are dwellers on the threshold between the real and the virtual, unsure of our footing, inventing ourselves as we go along” - meant to summon up in

Michael Heim’s The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality is a prime example of this type of work as it tests the limits of hyperbole. ^ Katherine Hayles’s work is notable in this regard. See also Braidotti.

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Turkle’s account the rich novelty of some certain aspects of cybercultures ~ can come to represent a problem when in loose translation it transmutes into unsustainable claims about the definitionally ‘liberatory’ effects of Internet role playing. For an example of how this can happen, we can look to the work of someone like the frequently astute cultural critic Steven Shaviro, who once asseverated that in cyberspace “selves are no longer constrained by rules of unity and organic form; you can adopt whatever pseudonym you want. W e are all the same in cyberspace, and anyone can be replaced by anyone else.”^®Aside from whatever other problems with rigor and scope it has (What does ‘the same’ mean here? Or ‘replaced?’ And is ‘anyone’ really just anyone, or does it have an unstated referent?), such a comment would also seem to miss the point of Turkle’s work, which is that the Internet can and has been used by some of its enthusiasts to manage particular identity constructs that they invent to explore beyond the perceived boundaries of their ‘real life’ selves. Thus Shaviro’s remark and others like it, in which the alleged ‘unencumbrance’ of online identity is trumpeted at the expense of

Qtd. In Kendrick, p. 154

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specificity and complication'^®, are rendered even more dubious when seen in the light of Turkle’s analysis properly understood.

Does this mean then that, in contrast to the suggestion above about the consonance between Turkle’s work and some of the other, more poorly gauged scholarly interventions in the field (however unmotivated such a connection is on her part), this work should be seen as having nothing to do with the strain of cyber-theory that has chosen to posit the Internet as a space where a phrase like "inventing ourselves as we go along” would refer to a completely unfettered play of identity rather than to a gradual discovery of the possibilities attached to a newly available technology, as it does for Turkle? Given the point just made about the differences between Turkle’s way of thinking and the understanding expressed in the statement by Shaviro, perhaps it will be objected here that she should hardly be held responsible for the ideas of those proponents of the virtual life who inflate and/or distort her insights about identity work as an important component of (some) Internet users’ engagements with the technologies they encounter there. Undoubtedly, this is quite true up to a point, her work has in some ways discouraged the type of reading of the nature of Internet identity play ascribed above to analysts less clear-sighted than herself. But even if she

Shaviro is hardly the only one to have taken up this perspective. As Sconce notes, "(T)he 'subject' of cybertheory ... frequently reigns in academic discourse as

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does not herself hyperbolize (usually) In her discussions of the Internet and identity, what she does have in common with most of the other commentators on cybercultures is that she has almost completely avoided considering the politica! implications of the identity work she has done so much to elucidate. This lack of attention to cultural politics appears in her case to be connected to a somewhat straitened understanding of the notion of identity, something which in her optic can be given meaning only in relation to biographical 'case studies' rather than in the framework of larger, not-only-technological historical narratives. More needs to be said here, then, about what relation Turkle’s conceptualization of Intemet identity work, with its overriding emphasis on “using virtual experience for personal transformation,”'^'' does have to the tendency in a wide spectrum of the scholarship of cyberspace to overlook many if not all of the political aspects of online identity experimentation. One of Turkle’s primary focuses in her investigation of “identity in the age of the Internef is the MUD. Indeed, her work remains among the most comprehensive and suggestive of those devoted to explicating the

significance of MUDs, a topic to which a fairly large degree of attention has thus far been given by commentators on cyberspace. Surveying the field.

a self-evident, emancipated entity free to reinvent itself in the new electronic frontier" (p.5). Turkle, p. 269

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the sociologist David Lyon correctly says that much of the scholarly work on MUDs has been justified to the extent that these online environments “invite consideration as to the outcome of an accelerating rise in computermediated communications that has been occurring since the 1990s.”^^ Putting this type of scholarship in a wider social context, however, Lyon notes that “|t]o read some such studies one could be forgiven for imagining that the majority of the population is engrossed in MUDs for a large proportion of their waking time!”^^ This preponderant emphasis on “online

life,” and in particular the still relatively uncommon phenomenon of role playing in multi-user environments, as the locus of inquiry in such scholarship has the effect of in large part leaving aside certain key questions about how online practices are shaped by larger social and cultural determinations. There have been important exceptions to the tendency to rely on this kind of too narrow emphasis; among others, there have been Slater and Miller’s ethnography of Trinidadians’ use of the Intemet for a variety of purposes, Nina Wakeford’s study of the gender relations in and around an Internet cafe, and Lori Kendall’s work on a California-based "virtual pub" at which she was a participant and ethnographic observer for a few years."^ But it has often been the case that

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Lyon 2002, p.28 Ibid., p. 33 See Slater and Miller; Wakeford; Kendall.

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discussions of online practices and/or community remain insufficiently contextualized. This has especialiy been a problem, to come back to the question asked earlier about Turkle’s work, with regard to issues of racial identity and cultural politics. In some incisive critical remarks about “theories of the multipleselved. unrooted inhabitants of cyberspace,” McPherson contends that when such theories “do not directly and explicitly engage with issues of race, racism, and racial representation, they help to construct a raceless fantasy space.”’’® “Whether this space is filled with MUDers,” she goes on to write, “happily swapping gender, freed from the constraints of embodied identity and geographic origin, or neorebels dreaming of cybersecession and new visions of old places” - as in McPherson’s own work on “virtual Dixie,” the constellation of U.S.-based Web sites oriented around the promotion of a nostalgically-tinged Southem white identity - “the default setting is still all too white.”’’®The consequences of allowing whiteness to remain unmarked as an element of these online cultural formations are, McPherson implies, no less great when it is a question of examining how MUDers inhabit their online identities than when the concern is to account for how self-proclaimed “Southern nationalists” use the Internet to carry out

McPherson, p. 120 Ibid., p. 120

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the “very serious battle over the demands of place, race and identity” that McPherson calls “reconstructing 01x16.’“^^ In the latter case we can readily see that much is at stake in determining how in the process of ‘making self the denizens of virtual Dixie express or elide expressing the necessarily very strong association with whiteness and white racial domination, however implicit these may remain in some instances, that their nostalgia for the Confederacy evokes. Indeed, to the extent that the movement towards occupying such a racial identity that occurs within these Web sites serves towards “reconstructing ‘the old South, the new South, and the future South’ as a fairly traditional and static place,” it is most decidedly a political gesture, all the more so because, as McPherson explains, there is

little actual need on the part of those participating in this movement to refer in any specific way to the fact that the neo-Confederacy constitutes a racial project.'^ Under the circumstances, cultural critics looking at the virtual Dixie sites would be remiss if they failed to develop some kind of conceptual platform from which to examine how whiteness signifies therein. In other cybercultural contexts like MUDs, on the other hand, sometimes it can be more difficult to see what bearing race and racial identity might have on the cultural work at hand. Does it make sense, then, for someone like

Ibid., p. 119 Ibid., p. 129

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McPherson to insist that cybercultural critics need to pay just as much attention to these factors with regard to such sites? Here it will be useful to return to Turkle’s summary statement about Internet users’ work of “using virtual experience for personal transformation,” especially since it is Turkle, among others, at whom McPherson directs her critique. First, though, it needs to be said that it is not entirely accurate to claim that Turkle herself simplifies her account of the performance of MUD personae to suggest that the performers are thereby "freed from the constraints of embodied identity,” since she is

certainly interested in registering how this performance work is integrated into some kind of global ‘sense of selves’ by those who undertake it. Embodied Identity may not always be emphasized in her discussions of the “serious play” of this identity work, but at the same it is not wholly ignored. Rather, the larger question for Turkle’s work, on my reading, Is what it means for her analysis that it centers so much on the element of “personal transformation” that she discerns in the phenomena she observes. Again and again in Life on the Screen, Turkle identifies situations in which MUDbased identity experimentation is used as a “vehicle for self-reflection.” Seldom, however, is this process of “self-reflection” seen against the background of anything other than the most schematic type of biographical trajectory. Despite her admonition to “cultivate our awareness of what

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stands behind our screen personae" - which admonition, in fact, is followed by the reassurance that by dint of doing so “we [will be| more likely to succeed in using virtual experience for personal transformation” - she tends to underplay or leave aside altogether what that background material actually looks like in any kind of wider, sociological sense. But perhaps an illustration of this problem is in order at this point. Describing the experience of one of her informants, Turkle uses the metaphor of depaysement to try to get at what effect the informant's gender swapping play has had on his personal identity. Turkle translates this as

“’decountrifying’ oneself,” according to which “one leaves one’s own culture to face something unfamiliar, and upon returning home it [meaning “one’s own culture”] has become strange - and can be seen with fresh eyes.”’*® In the case of the informant who returns to enacting a male persona in a MUD after a prolonged spell of playing a female, it is apparently a question of now being able to more effectively see what it means to perform maleness. The problem remains, however, that notwithstanding any recognition he may have had about the limitations of available models of masculinity to fully encompass his desires and concerns, the informant continues to be unable to play a male character in the MUD in such a way that he can offer his help to other MUDers without creating the impression that his solicitude

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merely serves to mask a “seduction ploy.”®° The persistence of this problem, which Turkle duly notes without subjecting to any real analysis, suggests that her reading of the so-called depaysement of her informant does too little to take into account something absolutely critical, something indeed that has been discussed at length in the literature of anthropology in recent decades; the subjectivity of the ethnological voyager, his ‘freshness of vision’ derived from a sojourn with the strangeness of the Other, is not merely his own concern, but must instead be recognized as something that is both produced by and productive of the apparatus of knowledge production within which he works.®^ Leaving aside for a moment the question of how the experience of “decountrifying oneself,” whether metaphorically or otherwise, might differ for actors situated at a greater distance than Turkle’s informant from ‘owning’ the particular culture in which they happen to find themselves, there is still the crucial matter of whether this work of self-estrangement is most cogently treated in a frame of reference focusing on “personal transformation" or whether it is necessary to do more to map the wider historical, interactional and political economic matrices within which such work takes place and acquires meaning ® With

Turkle. p. 218 “ Ibid., p. 219 See Clifford and Marcus, esp. pp. 22-26. Burkhalter, by contrast, emphasizes the interactional dimension of the negotiation of race in his analysis of an intemet discussion group.

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Turkle’s informant this latter approach might involve asking in greater detail about how, for example, the “differences in men’s and women’s communication styles” are structured by historical and social factors that include but are not limited to something like their relative access to new information and communication technologies. This more expansive treatment of the cultures of Internet identity play might also profitably consider, to come back to McPherson’s point, the extent to which those who take part in them (as well as those who analyze them) are prone to assume and to leave unexamined - to keep as their “default setting,” in other words - the whiteness of their “own culture.” Any tendency to bracket race in such settings would be especially pertinent with regard to Turkle’s occasional ‘ethnologist’, since as the recent inquiry into “race and the subject of masculinities” has endeavored to demonstrate, “racial maleness is the origin as well as the product of local transactions between the social and the psychic, of negotiations among popular forms of representation and political ideologies, and of technologies of performance."®^ It would be wrongheaded to say that the desire for - or even the cultural imperative towards - “personal transformation” is not an important property of online role-playing. What the above has been meant to suggest is not that an examination of the labor of self-regeneration should not be

Uebel, p. 2

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included in the study of this type of performance, but that it is also possible to situate such identity work in a broader and perhaps more effectively explanatory framework than what Turkle offers. Some of the more recent scholarship on new media and cyberspace has headed in this direction, emphasizing the historical context in which the relevant technologies and technological practices have developed and giving attention to key moments in the development of the discourse that has surrounded them.^ In a related vein, in her discussion of the possibly generative connections to be made between postcolonial studies and something she calls “cyberpunk” (which is used to refer to a literary genre and more broadly to certain kinds of cyberculture), Emily Apter has argued that in online role playing “the ironic screening of the subject can in some instances lead to a productive critical unmasking of complacent selfhood, capitalist fantasy, multicultural masquerade, racial phobia or civil dysfunction within the so-called public sphere of the postnation.”®® And then there is Gomez-Pena. Interesting to juxtapose to the foregoing remarks about Turkle is Gomez Pena’s observation, in his 1991 essay “A Binational Performance Pilgrimage,” that while studying at the elite art school colloquially known as Cal Arts he found that “most art students were involved in their personal process {which was]

^ See in particular Caldwell's edited volume, Theories of the New Media: A Historical Perspective. Apter, pp. 215-216

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restricted to the realms of sexual and psychological crisis, family hatred, and technological idolatry.”®®Connecting this tendency to take up the stuff of melodrama while transposing it onto experimental aesthetic production to an ethnocentrism that prevented most of the white American students from taking any interest in the local or regional Chicano and Mexican cultures, Gomez-Pena deplores the overall effect of depoliticization that he encountered in this supposedly radical (in expressive terms) environment.

While such a report about the deformations attendant to a 1970s art school training may seem to have more the status of impressionistic account than of hard evidence, and while the generalizations about the blinkered concerns of conceptual art may seem contestable in some ways when applied to the field as a whole, we in any case can see here that in his criticisms of the insularity of that particular Cal Arts scene Gomez-Pena anticipates to some extent the ‘privatized’, still parochial approach to selfexpression that Turkle would later foreground in her analysis of cyberidentity.®^ It is especially striking that along with his characterization of this conceptual art aesthetic of earlier decades in terms of “personal

Gomez-Pena 1991, p. 21 A recently published anthology on Conceptual Art offers a more nuanced view of this field of cultural production. See Alberro and Stimson.

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transformation,” Gomez-Pena ampiifies the element of “technological idolatry” that began to emerge (with new media) at the time. By the time he gets to the Internet in 1994, Gomez-Pena finds that some of the same ethnocentric determinations are in place. In a 1996 essay devoted to recounting his experience (along with his collaborator Sifuentes) of going online in 1994, Gomez-Pena writes: We were...perplexed by the ‘benign (not native) ethnocentrism’ permeating the debates around art and digital technology. The unquestioned lingua franca was English, ‘the official language of international communications’; the vocabulary utilized in these discussions was hyper-specialized and depoliticized; and if Chicanos and Mexicans didn’t participate enough in the Net, it was solely because of lack of information or interest (not money and access), or again because we were ‘culturally unfit.’ The unspoken assumption was that our true interests were grassroots (by grassroots I mean the streets), representational or oral (as if these concerns couldn't exist in a virtual space). In other words, we were to remain dancing salsa, painting murals, writing flamboyant love poetry, and plotting revolutions in rowdy cafes.”®®

If some of the language in this passage is ambiguous - it isn’t clear, for instance, what Gomez-Pena means when he uses the term

“representational” - the point of including it here is to submit the notion that

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Gomez-Pena’s later work in Temple o f Confessions exists to respond to an ongoing refusal to acknowledge Chicanos and Mexicans as proper subjects of information technology, something that from his perspective is primarily attributable to ethnocentrism. It also bears mentioning here that GomezPena’s comment echoes Davila’s remarks about the construction of the Latino/a market in line with the marketing industry’s concern to remain on the ground of the ‘safely authentic’; Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes’s intervention definitely aims to trouble this reduction of Mexican and Chicano cultures to the status of pre-technological other. Likewise, we should remember Davila’s recognition of the fact that the ‘Latin explosion’ of the 1990s occurred hand in hand with the rise of technologies, and by extension technological cultures (in Gomez-Pena’s account, the Internet and cybercultures), that contributed via the “benign ethnocentrism” of the latter to rendering Latinos exotically retrograde, as it were, and invisible in the cyberspatial precincts of the public sphere. To combat this kind of marginalization, Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes insist not only on cybercultural visibility but more importantly on presenting themselves as gatekeepers (‘border saints’) offering admission to a hybridized cultural and technological space, heavily inflected by a Chicano and Mexican cultural sensibility, within which a dichotomy like grassroots/technologically current

“ Gomez-Pena 2000, p. 178

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would no longer hold in a hard and fast way. Indeed, as is evident in Temple and as Gomez-Pena declares in the aforementioned essay on the Internet, “contradiction prevails” in the “Chicano Interneta” that he envisions summoning up.®® Here we might also recall Haraway’s exhortation, cited in the introduction, to work from a position of ambivalence when dealing with cybercultures: it certainly seems that Gomez-Pena has somerthing like this in mind when reflecting on the aims and methods of his and Sifuentes's cultural work on the Internet. There is thus an effort on the part of the artists to represent

Mexicans and Chicanos as fully engaged agents within the realm of the information technological, albeit with engaged here coming to mean something very different than both “worthy of inclusion”®®and “innovative” at a purely technological level.®'' At the same time, Temple moves to confront the audience participant with an entirely different program of depaysement than Turkle appears to have in mind in her analysis of ‘playing in the MUD’. Rather than locate the subjectivity effects of surveying the other In terms of the re-enchantment of the ethnological surveyor’s vision upon ‘repatriating the self (a term with charged associations for Turkle’s informant’s return to masculinity), Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes seek to sharpen the

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Ibid., p. 178 “ Ibid. p. 179 61 ibid., p. 178 60

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participant/surveyor’s capacity to envision what is involved, politically and ethically, in ‘crossing the border’ in the first place. If technocultural role playing and the discourses attending it typically involve a focus on how the player manages to subject to experimentation and perhaps re-incorporate aspects of a discretely figured self, Temple asks him or her to put aside such a focus in the interest of examining how much this kind of experimentation depends on an often unacknowledged displacement of the political and ethical implications of his and her encounters with racial and cultural otherness. This movement towards re-setting priorities vis a vis identity play can help to counteract a tendency that Lisa Nakamura has discerned in cybercultures to engage in the work of racialization while simultaneously disavowing that race plays any part in contouring the “free space of play” that MOOs and MUDs are taken to make possible. Nakamura effectively shows how “the vast majority of Asian male characters in [one] MOO fit into familiar stereotypes from popular electronic media such as video games, television and film, and popular literary genres such as science fiction and historical romance.”®^ Observation would thus appear to reveal the persistence in cyberspace of the most non-reflective kind of racial thinking. But as with Temple, there is more going on here than the presentation of

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stereotypes; Nakamura theorizes that this type of MOO-based role playing is not the mere result of a casually racist poverty of imagination on the part of the performers, but rather is rooted in such performers’ intention to “tip their interlocutors off to the fact that they are not “really” Asian; they are instead playing in a familiar type of performance.”®^ The use of these “cybertypes,” as Nakamura calls them, thus indicates that it is possible that the performers have less interest in discovering some aspect of the r selves that would correlate with a type of alterity they might associate with ‘Asianness’ than with signaling to other participants in the MOO that they share the prerogative, more commonly attached to whiteness, of “crossing over racial boundaries temporarily and recreationally.”®^ Responding to this use of techno-identity to preserve and shore up the privileges of whiteness, whether with or without the “freshness of vision” Turkle talks about and Nakamura implicitly puts into question, is what Temple is all about. Taking up apparatuses of discourse with a normatively individuating bent like the opinion survey or the confessional, within which participants are typically asked to act from the perspective of the “bounded” individual to declare opinions or lay out transgressions®®, the artists work to

Nakamura, p. 38 Ibid., p. 39 Ibid., p. 39 Cf. the useful discussion in Crampton's The Political Mapping of Cyberspace of the role of confessional discourse, or what he calls "self-writing," in cybercultural

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move their audience into a discursive space more !ike the MUD, where players are invited to enter into vantages less constrained by the expectation of full self-consistency. The representation of a persona like the Cyber-Vato is most certainly a challenge to the audience’s possibly limited vision, as per Nakamura, of what cybercultures tend to offer, but it is at the same time something of a prompt to perform a response that can test the boundaries of self-understanding (albeit with the problems referred to earlier about the effect of using 'subversive' stereotypes being taken into

account). To confess one’s multicultural sins to the Cyber-Vato becomes in this context something that requires not only searching the self and delivering up the relevant information, but instead a process of translation, whereby reckoning with one’s own identity can involve (especially for the

white participant) considering more carefully what it means to incorporate the effects of an encounter with racial alterity, whether in an affective or more ideological sense. Engaging in such an act of translation would not accord with the depaysement of Turkle or the “identity tourism” Nakamura criticizes because it would shift the focus of interracial encounter from self­

edification or normative whiteness to a mutually pursued, minoritarian steered process of discussing and examining the work of racialization.

spaces like blogging communities. The analysis in this dissertation diverges, as will be clear in the next chapter, from the mostly uncritical valorization of cybercuitural community that Crampton offers.

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Through various means, as in the survey questions discussed above or in the installation of the artists as "border saints” whose personae signal both authority and abjection, the audience is also summoned to reflect on how any resulting shared critique of racialization would have to confront and work against the structural power imbalances that could relegate Latinos and other people of color to secondary standing even in this work of combating racial injustice. That it is crucial for Latino artists like Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes to be doing the work of provoking consideration of how ethnoracial identities are configured in a historical conjuncture when conceptualizations of and choices about the composition of such identities are increasingly momentous is brought home by a text like Etzioni’s monumentally tendentious The Monochrome Society. Using the text to urge Americans towards the abandonment of racial identifications in the name of national unity, Etzioni contends that the ways Hispanics come to see themselves in the future is the single most Important factor in determining to what extent America will continue to be a primarily monochrome society. If Hispanics view themselves largely as white, continue to share basic American values, and recognize that they are not all one of a kind (just the way other white groups are not), America’s diversity will not overwhelm its essentia! unity. If Hispanics view

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themselves as if they were a racial minority, of one kind, and increasingly ally themselves with those African Americans who seek social and normative separateness (which by itself is a declining number), maintaining a monochrome America will be seriously challenged.®®

Referring here to the process of racial/ethnic self-identification on the U.S. Census, Etzioni posits the idea that America hinges bebween two vastly divergent destinies, the determination of which depends on the future willingness of “Hispanics” to recognize themselves “largely as white.” That America has already realized a “monochrome society” (also “largely as white"?) is only the most glaring of the untenable assumptions in place here; the whole voluntarist emphasis on the autonomy of racial selfdetermination, according to which Latinos choose not only in the relevant Census box but also in everyday life which race they want to be, is also immensely questionable. Indeed, it is very much akin to the specious notion that online role-playing creates opportunities for players to free themselves from the ethnoracial identifications that, regardless of whether or not they have been 'chosen' as such, they objectively occupy. In any case, we can say that Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes share with someone like Etzioni the sense that the performance of racial identity has enormous consequences

®®Etzioni, p. 19; Rodriguez, meanwhile, offers a far more nuanced view of the complications of ethnoracial identity as they play out for Latinos in the context of

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not only for the individual performer but also for American social life as a whole. Where the artists would seriously differ in their analysis from Etzioni is in their view that in a properly democratic multicultural society the negotiation of racial identity is not something that can be readily be opted out of in favor of “essential unity,” especially when the burdens of ‘having’ a race have thus far fallen so heavily and disproportionately on racial minorities, and when an ‘alternative’ to the status quo that involves uncritically adopting “basic American values,” with the apparent effect of continuing to elevate whiteness to the status of organizing principle, is effectively no altemative at all. Another way of putting this is that in Temple the artists try to bring their audiences into a forum where any kind of “social and normative separateness,” but above all whiteness as the socially dominant racial identification, cannot be maintained against a minoritarianadvanced political imperative to acknowledge racial and cultural otherness within fields of knowledge and practice that are more fully intersubjective and more equitably arranged. Where it is, again, a question of seeing how the ever-continuing undertaking of racial formation manifests in the particular contexts offered by cybercultures, Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes’s contributions in this

the U.S. census. See her recent book, Changing Race: Latinos, the Census and the History of Ethnicity in the United States.

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connection seem still more important when we recognize that even on the part of some of the most prominent of those, like Mark Poster, who have begun to venture in the direction of “shifting our theories of cyberspace away from tropes of ‘piay’, ‘multiplicity,’ and ‘theater’ towards explorations of ‘citizens,’ ‘politics,’ and ‘publics’”®^, there is still a proclivity for scoping race and cultural politics in cyberspace in terms that limit them to an afterthought. In Poster’s essay, “Cyberdemocracy: The Internet and the Public Sphere,” wherein he recognizes that “Internet communities” (he makes little attempt to draw distinctions among the different types of such communities) often center on the “inscription of new assemblages of self­ constitution,” the author makes the prognostic assertion (writing in the mid90s) that when audio and video enhance the current textual mode of conversation the claims of these virtual realities [he is primarily referring to MOOs] may even be more exigent. The complaint that these electronic villages are no more than the escapism of white, male undergraduates may then become less convincing.®®

McPherson, p, 129 ®®Poster 1997, p. 217

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After scanting the issue of race throughout his entire disquisition on “cyborg politics” in this article,®® at this point in the essay (two paragraphs from the end) Poster suddenly brings It into view. But to what degree is race really made to appear in these speculative remarks on the possible future of Internet identity practices and discourse? We are told that it is through and here we are forced to ask, “Only through?” - the introduction of new technologies that it will become possible to see the procedures of “self­ constitution” in online environments as something more than just the preserve of young, white, technophilic males. The idea would seem to be that the purely technical limitations of the media through which cybcercultural participants communicate are the primary impediments to achieving a greater degree of racial equity on the Internet. ‘Default whiteness,’ in this optic, is something that is supposedly liable to be first and foremost technology-driven.

®®Though prolepsis is something of a given in Internet discourse, it is nevertheless remarkable that in this article Poster goes as far as to say that “because the Internet inscribes the new social figure of the cyborg and institutes a communicative practice of seif-constitution, the political as we have known it is reconfigured” (218). No matter how ‘theoretical’ his orientation here, one can’t help but feel that he has leaped far beyond presenting a sustainable claim about the ‘actually existing’ cultures of the Internet. To be persuaded otherwise would require the presentation of at least one concrete and compelling example of the reconfiguration of the political Poster announces. But no such illuminating instance graces Poster’s article, not by a long-shot.

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Leaving aside the question of what effects the augmentation of multimedia communication actually will have or has had in cybercuitural environments, what is especially striking to note here is that Poster envisions the work of re-directing identity and race on the Internet in such a way as to emphasize technological change rather than cultural agency. It is as if the process of de-whitening cybercultures is to occur in the absence of any particular initiatives on the part of the participants and interlocutors of such cultures. There is no mention here, much less any consideration, of those who are doing the cultural work of challenging ‘default whiteness’ in cyberspace from minoritarian perspectives. This version of so-called cyborg politics would thus appear to take precious little account of the way that minoritarian cultural work like Temple of Confessions expressly intervenes into the ongoing composition and revision of racial identity in technocultures. Any account of Intemet cultural politics operating on the basis of such an omission, as must be evident to anyone who has given more careful consideration to this field of cultural production, can offer at best a blinkered view of the contestation of racialization in this sphere. It is this kind of myopia, as much as anything else, that Temple of Confessions exists to combat and rectify.

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Chapter 3 - Re-Collecting Race in a Minoritarian Frame of Reference: Keith Obadike’s Blackness for Sale, eBay, and the Contested Trope of Community in Cyberspace

The work of information technology critique in the context of the Intemet search directory (as in the first chapter) or gallery/opinion survey (as in the second) derives much of its interest and importance from the fact that the artists who do such work use their interventions to question the operative logic of particular kinds of well-known, oft-employed knowledge instruments. “Mongrel” forms of knowledge-making are introduced into processes of data gathering and organizing where these are normally excluded or marginalized, and this allows for a preliminary evaluation, from a political and ethical vantage, of both the more immediate functionings of these technologies as such and their potent purchase on social imaginaries. But what happens when an artist brings the same kind of de-reifying orientation to a recently developed site of information technology that is typically understood less as a vehicle for knowledge retrieval and production than as a kind of gigantic online flea market, a quintessential

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example of a ‘consuming technology, as the title of an early 1990s materia! culture anthology puts it?'' Despite the fact that eBay, the site in question, is primarily a medium for the exchange of commodities rather than an instrument for the recovery and/or processing of information, is it possible to discern in its workings a kinship to those of the other knowledge sites considered in this dissertation? And what differences in effect is it possible to see where the critical performance around an information technology involves the artist’s choice to strategically commodify his racial identity, aspects of which, by his own account, impel him to critique eBay? What does it mean for an African-American artist to auction his ‘blackness’ at The World’s Online MarketplaceTM, as Keith Obadike attempted to do in August of 2001? And what, correspondingly, does it mean that eBay deemed it necessary to block the artist’s bid to carry out his project, which he called Blackness for Sale, within its commercial and conceptual space? Keith Obadike is a young sound, performance and new media artist whose other works include SEXMACHINES, a group of musical compositions constructed from noises produced by sex toys; an online opera dealing with migration and the intersection of technology and language. Sour Thunder, and my hands/wishful thinking, an elegiac online memorial to Amadou Diallo, the Senegalese immigrant shot 41 times in the

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doorway of his Harlem apartment building by the New York City police in February of 1999. Both of the latter were collaborations with his partner Mendi Lewis Obadike. Still closer in some ways than any of these works to the themes and style of Blackness for Sale is Pushing White Walls/360 (Resistance Study), a 1998 performance piece in which the artist pushed against a white wall for 4 minutes - or as his own laconic and idiosyncratic account of the piece puts it, for “3 minutes and 60 seconds” - as a “private action and a resistance study”. Like Blackness for Sale, this piece can be read as, Inter alia, both an ironically literaiizing reflection on the vicissitudes of occupying a position of non-white alterity in the art world and as a metacommentary on the limitations of the media in which Obadike chooses to work.^ More emphasis will be placed on the latter point in the discussion that follows in this chapter, with an attempt to demonstrate how Obadike’s work puts into question some of the cardinal assumptions about the Internet as it has functioned as context for both vemacular aesthetic cultures and for

^ Indeed, though It doesn't appear to be the primary focus of the work and will not be the focus of the discussion that follows, it is worth noting here that Obadike uses Blackness for Sale to highlight some of the ambiguous perks and drawbacks of being a black artist in the USA at this historical juncture, pointing out that upon purchase from him "[tjhis Blackness may be used for creating black art" but that ”[t]he Seiler does not recommend that this Blackness be used in the process of making or selling 'serious' art." In other words, or such is the suggestion, inclusion of the multiculturalist variety does not entail any automatic expansion of the range of expressive modes via which a black artist can come to be recognized in the overwhelmingly white world of high art.

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iterations of cultural identity and community that are in some, but certainly not in all, ways novel. At this point there will be a brief description of the work, Blackness

for Sale, a documentary record of which can be viewed at www.obadike.tripod.com/ebav.html. along with some initial commentary. A more extended analysis of the piece will follow below after a discussion of the principal target of Obadikes's critique, eBay. In certain ways, Blackness for Sale is like an intentionally flattened out, thumbnail sketch of what it means, from the perspective of the artist, to be African-American in the

early years of the 21 century. Consisting principally of a series of “Benefits” and “Warnings” provided to the potential buyer of the “heirloom [that] has been in the possession of the seller for twenty-eight years” Obadike’s blackness, in other words - Blackness for Sale endeavors to summon up some of the most significant contemporary social concerns and sites of cultural engagement and conflict animating the politics of race in America, all the while presenting itself as an informal auction prospectus of the type customarily seen on eBay. For example, on the side of the social there is an allusion, in the list of warnings, to the voting scandal in Florida in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, while access to the social equity program known as Affirmative Action is listed as a benefit, albeit available

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only as a “limited time offer.” In the framework of culture, one of the (ambiguous) benefits assigns the buyer license to make jokes about black people and/or laugh comfortably at “black humor,” while one of the

warnings advises against using “this Blackness” in Hollywood. References to Florida and Hollywood suggest a particular focus on the American context; indeed, Obadike clarifies the field of application of his work when, in a proviso attached to the prospectus, he notes that his Blackness “has been used primarily in the United States and its functionality outside of the U.S. cannot be guaranteed."^ Notwithstanding this limitation, the listing notes that in addition to anywhere in the USA the item can be shipped to Canada, which appears to take its place here as the post-NAFTA, already fully enveloped national Other, however different its own historical experience with racialization may have been. For its part, eBay contributes to situating the work by providing the category of ‘Black Americana’ (along

with ‘Fine Art’) within which to account for its geographical, cultural, and commercial bearings, though it is Obadike himself who, with barbed irony, chooses to sell his Blackness alongside the items in this category, a catch­ all which is in large part a repository of racial travesties of the Aunt Jemima variety. With this decision Obadike evidently has in view, among other things, the fact that the “auctioneers, gallery owners, and museum curators

Pace Howard Winant, 2002

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regularly cluster together ironwork skiilfully crafted by Louisiana artisans with tobacco cans depicting toothless, sloppily attired black men,” as the folklorist Patricia Turner notes in a discussion of the cultural history of such racially charged artifacts.'^ Along with whatever other cultural work it does, Obadike’s piece would thus seem to perform in a critical way the logical extension of this indifference to the symbolically violent effects of classifying stereotypically racist items alongside the products of black artisans or, mutatis mutandis, black Conceptual artists. Given the amount of hype that has accompanied the emergence of eBay - emblematized by, among other things, the fact that Newsweek magazine chose “The United States of eBay” as the title for its June 2002 cover story about the eBay phenomenon - it is perhaps not surprising to see artists using the site as material for their work. Indeed, Obadike wasn’t the first and will undoubtedly not be the last to offer something of a vaguely subversive, aesthetically-oriented nature for sale on eBay. In April of 2000, a sixteen-year-old white Canadian named Michael Daines put up “the body of a young man in overall good condition with minor imperfections” (presumably his own) for auction. Judging by the language Daines used to advertise the ‘item’ and the accompanying photo, which showed a headless, t-shirted, white male body, as well as the auction category into

“ Turner, p. 10

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which Dalnes’s item was placed (Antiques), with this intervention the young web designer was especially concerned to provide a broadly-cast commentary on the commodity status of the body in late capitalism.® In a more elaborate reading, the curators of the 2002 Montreal Biennale chose to see Daines’s work as a kind of self-portrait in a context where the presentation of self is filtered through ambiguated layers of media identity, technological anonymity and “diffuse, yet real eroticism.” The fact that the

work was presented in the specific medium of eBay is for the most part peripheral to this reading.® With Obadike’s work, however, eBay and the practice of online auctioneering become an integral element in what the artist is doing. With Daines’s piece or that of Kembrew McLeod, a communications scholar and media activist who sold his soul on eBay (for $1300) in March of 2000, the fact that something appearing to be inalienable from the artist is

See D. Lowe. ®The Biennale organizers included Daines's work among a group of other net art projects dealing with the status of the self and the self-portrait in contemporary media environments. Though they acknowledged that the Inclusion of this work might be questioned on grounds that ’The Body of Michael Daines" might more reasonably be considered a prank, they also held, for somewhat obscure reasons having to do with the "flawless simplicity of [Daines’s] gesture," that the work could be seen as belonging to the category of Conceptual Art. Whatever the proper framework for understanding his action, Daines has extended the commercial if not the aesthetic reach of his project by continuing to offer "unlimited edition" reproductions of the photo from his eBay ad for US$50 (www.ciac.ca/magazine/en/cadre.htm).

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nevertheless offered at auction can be taken as a kind of plaintively ironic disavowal of the genera! process Habermas once chose to refer to as the colonization of the lifeworld, wherein the quantification of meaning attendant to late capitalism achieves ever greater penetration of social life at the expense of values generated through and refined by ethically-grounded communicative reason. Supporting this reading of these pieces is McLeod’s explanation of his action, which involved invoking the truism that “everyone sells their (sic) soul metaphorically.”^ The context of the online auction is important to these works inasmuch as it facilitates their delivery, but eBay and the practices surrounding it are not what their authors choose to focus on as such. Turning to Blackness for Sale, we can quickly recognize that the explicit injection of African-American racial identity into the self-for-sale scenario alters to a considerable degree the conceptual terrain on which such a work can operate. But though it is obvious at first glance that the work invokes the horrifying historical practice of selling Africans into slavery, Obadike does not attempt to make any overt connections between Blackness for Sale and the African slave trade. Indeed, when juxtaposed to a performance piece like Robbie McCauley’s Sally’s Rape, in which the artist stages with gut-wrenching pathos a mock slave auction wherein she is sold off to the audience, Obadike’s dry treatment of the “item” he offers for

Cited in A Cohen, 212

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sale has the effect of removing from this kind of pointed, visceral historical reference.® At the same time, however, ‘this Blackness’ is offered (with a heavy dose of irony) as something that is both rooted in a collective, ongoing experience of racism particular to African Americans and as something that is nevertheless likely to be highly desirable, for all the Warnings that come with it, to eBay consumers of whatever color who wish to try on a new Identity or simply to supplement the one they already have. On the one hand, then, there is specificity in the characterization of the

burdens and often fairly onerous ‘privileges’ that tend to come With being African American; and on the other, the near total abstraction of seeing “blackness” as merely a set of modular units of identity that can be bundled together and auctioned off as a transferable ‘persona’. But what kind of persona would it be? No photo is included in the ad, and the gender of the “blackness” that Obadike proposes to sell is marked only insofar as it belongs to a male seller. In other words, few if any of the Benefits or Warnings seem to apply specifically to any kind of genderspecific experience. One of the Benefits, however, offers that this Blackness will convey to the buyer the power to instill fear, which suggests an approach on Obadike’s part to ironizing and putting into question constructions of black masculinity that choose to in any way valorize this

For a description of this piece, see Carr, pp. 165-8 and Schneider, pp. 174-5.

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kind of ambiguous ‘power.’ There is at the same time no dearly defined class position attached to the blackness that Obadike aims to make available for purchase (comments about Hollywood and other types of aesthetic production notwithstanding); sexuality is likewise unmarked, as

well as level of education, place of residence, and so forth. In between the collective, lived, sometimes fraught experience of African American identity that the piece explicitly invokes and the kind of abstracted blackness that Obadike moves to put up on the auction block, there would seem to be an enormous gap. The meaning of this gap vis a vis eBay, the internet and the notion of online community will be the focus of the rest of this chapter. The chapter will concentrate on showing that Obadike’s performance of blackness on eBay forces reconsideration of the role that this important cybercuitural site plays in perpetuating presumptive whiteness on the Internet.

eBay and the Notion of Community

The following section will be devoted to examining the phenomenon that is eBay.com. The company (initially called AuctionWeb) and its website appeared online in 1995, founded by a computer programmer seeking ways

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to enable his hobbyist collector inamorata to find and purchase PEZ dispensers via the Internet, or so the apocryphal founding myth has it. One of the first sites devoted to facilitating auctions to appear online, eBay’s principal function has so far been to match up owners of various kinds of commodities who wish to sell them with buyers interested in taking these things off their hands. This matching up is accomplished on the model of a traditional auction crossed with an automated version of the classified advertisements in a newspaper. The company earns much of its revenue by charging the sellers a commission fee for unloading their items via the eBay site. In its early days, the items offered for bidding at the site were for the most part not kitschy, affect-laden trinkets like PEZ dispensers, but were instead of a far more practical type, with information technology hardware predominating. Over time, as the site grew in popularity, there was a shift towards a focus on the auctioning of collectibles, recirculated goods that had already acquired, or in some cases would only really begin to acquire via eBay, the status of consumption-ready memorabilia. The category of collectibles included perennial hobbyist favorites like coins, stamps and trading cards, along with others of more recent appearance like the dolls known as Beanie Babies, the mid-90s mania for which provided the

company with arguably its most important early source of revenue.® With

A. Cohen, p. 45

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the help of buyers willing to pay greatly inflated prices for items such as these last, as well as more generally the ‘massification’ of Internet use that began to occur in the U.S. during the mid 1990s, the company emerged by 1997 as the pre-eminent online auctioneer, with an 80% share of this market. Beginning at this point to become the object of an ever increasing amount of dot.com fanfare, the most successful of the online auction sites achieved the first of what would be several financial coups when in

September of 1998 its IPO topped out at $54.25, more than three times where it stood at the beginning of the day’s trading. (At its highest point to date, the stock price rose to the equivalent, after accounting for a number of splits, of more than $600). Unlike many other e-commerce start-ups which likewise benefited from the mania for and financial industry manipulation of capital investment in the so-called new economy, however, eBay’s business model and means of operating were not a study in the short-sighted and the

abortive.'*® So far from following the path of the Kozmos and eToys, in fact, the company has experienced what can only be regarded as a wild success, having become one of the few among the manifold ventures of its

Apropos of this manipulation and the rewards it brought to its beneficiaries, there is evidence that both Omidyar. eBay's founder, and Meg Whitman, its CEO at the time of the IPO, took part in questionable financial practices in connection with the Goldman Sachs Group's management of the company's initial public offering. For more information, see McGeehan.

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species to thrive in a truly pronounced way. The company’s meteoric rise in fortunes was such that by the end of 2001 it was projecting that its revenues in the following year would surpass $1 billion, an amount that seems staggering not only on account of the business’s quite recent inception but also because unlike one of its most significant competitors of the time, Amazon.com, it does not need to retain any kind of sales inventory to function, since that obligation falls upon the vast membership of what the company likes to refer to as the ‘eBay community’. But just what exactly accounts for this degree of mercantile success and its relative uniqueness in the context of e-commerce will not be an object of (further) speculation here, at least not in any direct way; rather, the focus of the first part of the discussion that follows will be on some of the wider social and cultural implications of the by-now massive popularity of this Internet-based “place to trade practically anything to practically anyone on earth,” as the company, with no lack of hyperbolic imprecision, declares in its mission statement. The element of eBay that is perhaps most readily recognized as salient for an analysis of its social and cultural import is something mentioned in passing above: the oft-remarked notion in popular accounts of the eBay phenomenon that the operation of the company’s technology has allowed for the formation of ‘community’ among its users. A corollary of this

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is that participation in this brand of communailty is by definition a benefit to those who join in. As will probably not be surprising, the company’s selfrepresentation involves dissemination and affirmation of these ideas. Thus, upon entering the eBay site one immediately finds that next to site navigational categories like “Browse”, “Sell”, or “Search", there is “Community”. What resides therein? One of the most prominent features of this precinct of the site is a panoply of discussion boards and chat rooms dedicated to categories of goods liable to be auctioned at eBay. To name just a few of these, there are Antiques, Bears, Comics. Science and Mystery, and Historical Memorabilia. In his overview of cybercultures, David Bell draws upon 1920s German sociology to identify Internet discussion groups as Bunde, meaning non-traditional communal formations drawn together in and by the collective expression of enthusiasm and affinity for a particular topic or set of topics.^^ Investigation reveals that this kind of collective expression would seem to be the point within these forums at eBay, though it certainly bears noting that there is a fairly high degree of reflexivity in the process, so that oftentimes posts concern technical issues

One area of affinity-based socializing that has been particularly prevalent on the Internet occurs within fan web sites, organized either by fans or by those with a financial stake in promoting the object of the fans' devotions. It would be remarkably inaccurate, however, to say as popular culture scholar Henry Jenkins does that "in some ways cyberspace is fandom writ large" (Jenkins, 159). Indeed, it scarcely even seems to need saying that there is vastly more to cyberspace than

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directly and/or exclusively related to the process of selling antiques (for example) at the site rather than more general notions pertaining to the economic and cultural value attached to particular items or to the overall category of Antiques. Activity at the more popular boards appeared to fluctuate, when examined in the latter half of 2002, between as few as five and as many as twenty posts in a day (but is generally closer to the latter), and the range of participation is wide, with contributions coming not only from the most well informed or experienced participants but also from those with comparatively little knowledge about the topic at hand. Posts are archived in such a way as to delineate discrete discussion topics; threads connected to these topics can be followed by clicking on a link to the initial post. Next to the screen name of anyone posting to these discussions is a number pertaining to the rating the poster has received for the sales services she has provided in her role as an auctioneer. The contents of the post can thus be indexed against a numerical rating of the discussant’s record of providing customer satisfaction as an auctioneer. One can infer that this is a method of establishing reliability in a context where, given the ever present possibility of fraud, shared enthusiasm may only go so far towards ensuring trust. Meanwhile, it also has to be recognized that the

is encompassed by the province of fandom or more generally by the tendencies summed up in the concept of the Bunde.

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subjectivity of eBay users qua discussion board participants and community members is thereby explicitly connected to their rote as entrepeneurs or quasi-entrepeneurs whose activities sustain the operation of the site. The discussant’s membership in the community is thus made to depend on two interdependent variables: a willingness to contribute to a pool of knowledge about a particular type of commodity or about eBay itself (or indeed about both at the same time): and a certain reliability in delivering goods to eBay customers and in accumulating capital for the company. None of the available discussion board categories is tailored in such

a way as to fully encompass a sub-category like Black Americana, though that of Historical Memorabilia might be taken for the one most likely to include some discussion of the “cultural items” falling under this heading. A review of the posts to this board over a six month period (August, 2002February, 2003) gave indication, however, that this is a seldom if ever discussed topic in this context. There was likewise no consideration of this topic during the same period at the more open-ended, less thematic discussion forum known as the Electronic Town Hall. From this it might be concluded that eBay makes room for users to discuss the political, cultural and historical issues surrounding the sale of artifacts of Black Americana, but that the users do not opt to address these matters in the forums given for doing so, either because they don’t see the need for such a discussion

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or because they prefer to express whatever concerns they might have related to the trade in this merchandise via some other outlet. This is perhaps a topic for ethnographic enquiry in the future. But whatever the reasons for the absence of such discussion, something that is certainly worth considering here is what it does to the circulation and signification of artifacts of the Aunt Jemima-type that they are treated on eBay (and of course elsewhere) as readily collectible, substantially uncontroversia!

‘cultural items’. The artist Fred Wilson, known for installations that critique the ‘museologic’ of collecting artifacts as such logic is conditioned by institutional practices of racism, presented an exhibition in 1995 dealing with the implications of the dissemination of this kind of ‘collectible’. Calling his show Collectibles, Wilson used hundreds of figurines embodying various examples of racist caricature of African Americans (along with photographs and a video depicting such items) to invite the audience to reflect on not only the grotesqueries of historical racism in the U.S. but also on the tendency to treat the present day work of collecting such material as a kind of disinterested, non-political project of historical preservation, something akin to what James Clifford has called the “salvage paradigm.’’^^ Susan Stewart observes that “the collection says that the world is given; we are

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inheritors, not producers, of value here. We ‘luck into’ the collection; it might attach itself to particular scenes of acquisition, but the integrity of those scenes is subsumed to the transcendent and ahistorical context of the collection itself.”^^ In his display of these objects, what Wilson aims to show is that historical preservation of this type tends to preserve a corpus of artifacts as ‘inheritance’ but does not carry with it - and indeed in some ways militates against - the imperative to interrogate the composition of the racial projects that contribute to determining the reception of such material in the historical context of the present day. To clarify, Wilson recognizes that according to the dehistoricizing logic of the collection it is all too easy for “cultural items” of this type to serve as signifiers of a racist past that has been putatively left behind in some definitive sense rather than to function as an index of ongoing political concems centering on racism and its ramified consequences. His response to this problem in the Collectibles show was to bring these artifacts into the critical and ‘productive’ present, either by creating contemporary reproductions of certain pieces or by conjuring up a wholly new artifact out of the (literal) shards of others. This latter tactic involved, among other things, covering a baseball bat with fragments of racist statuettes that he had used the bat to smash. (In fact, a performance video showing the destruction of these objects is featured in

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See Clifford.

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the exhibition). The resulting piece, which suggested a rejoinder to the notion that collecting and displaying such artifacts of racism is merely to fix them in the past rather than to actively respond to their purchase on the present and future, was called Club for Shango. To shift the focus here back to eBay and its cultural impact, we can begin to better recognize how the work of collecting via eBay works relative to the kind of concerns that Wilson addresses by examining what the novelist William Gibson, often taken to be a key contributor to the cybercultural imaginary, chooses to say in an account of his own experience of shopping on eBay in a 1999 Wired magazine article called

“My Obsession.”^'^ in an essay on what he calls the “idea of the Collectible,” Gibson speculates in roundly ahistorical terms (in distinct contrast to how Stewart urges us to approach the collectible) that the appeal of browsing for items in an online flea market has something to do with an atavism that he identifies as the "hunter-gatherer module,” according to which collectible hunters are in some sense instancing a primal urge to accumulate. Not surprisingly, he does very little to adduce examples of eBay trading that would summon up in a remotely clear way precisely what such commercial activities have to do with the survival strategies of pre- or non-agricultural

Stewart, p. 164 See Gibson.

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societies. Further, because he is presumably not quite entirely confident in this half-baked anachronism to do the work of exegesis, elsewhere in the article Gibson speaks of the prevalent contemporary impulse (presumably in the United States, though this is never specified) to collect things as “some desperate instinctive reconfiguring of the postindustrial flow, some basic mammalian response to the bewildering flood of sheer stuff we

produce.”"'^ All of this stuff can thus only be made organizable via the work of something without any properly historical dimension, meaning instinct,

abetted by a fully instrumentalized information technology, which is itself seen to stand metastatically outside the “postindustrial flow" which it is used to reorder. As offhand as these conjectures would appear to be, this does not stop Gibson from grandly pronouncing that with the advent of eBay one sees the appearance of the “first ‘real’ virtual place.”^® Aside from offering another perspective on the cultural work of collecting the Black Americana artifact, Wilson’s presentation of Club for Shango might also be seen as a rebuke, avant la lettre, to the centra! claims of Gibson’s Wired piece. Wilson’s Club can be read as making the point that artifact collecting as hunter-gatherer module should not be seen as an explanation, but as something that itself needs explanation. In other

15

Ibid.

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words, the idea that someone like Gibson could ignore all of the specific historical reasons for the popularity of collecting and circulating memorabilia, on eBay and elsewhere, in favor of nebulous soclobiologlstic postulates is precisely the sort of problem that Wilson is intent on confronting in his work. With Collectibles, Wilson is indeed interested in

highlighting the continuing symbolic violence behind the circulation of the detritus of American popular racism as collectible kitsch; more important still is to demonstrate how the cultural work of collecting tends towards performing the disavowal of what we might call the living history of the artifact, which is to say the meanings accruing around its production and representation (as much now as then) before particular interpretive communities at particular moments with particular consequences for the process of representation and the ways variously situated interpreters enter into it. Ultimately, what Collectibles - and Blackness for Sale, as will be made clearer in the course of this chapter - is able to bring to light is how much the logic of the collection, as it has in its most prominent form been so far constituted, depends on the preclusion of individual and collective investment in the living historicity of the artifact. As with Blackness for Sale, those encountering Wilson’s work are asked just exactly what it means to

This language recalls Castells’s three volume disquisition on cyberspace. See especially Castells, 1998. For critiques of Castells, see Nash's 2001 article and Slater and Miller, pp. 7-8.

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‘luck into’ the notional givenness of the displayed objects (the artifacts of ‘blackness’) in the absence of any sufficient political imperative to connect them to the conditions of their production and representation. Having taken this detour into a discussion of the cultural politics of the collectible, we will now be in a better position to recognize how eBay’s treatment of its version of community has tended to deal with concerns about diversity. The suggestion in the foregoing discussion has been that eBay’s market for collectibles might, especially where certain kinds of racially charged items are concemed, serve to reinforce and reproduce dehistoricized approaches to the exchange and circulation of cultural artifacts, rather than allowing for a more thoughtful consideration of these artifacts’ relation to the unfolding history of the present. Such a problem would in and of itself be of significance for scholars seeking to understand the cultural impact of eBay, but over and above such an issue there is additionally the question of how eBay attends to the discourse and practice of community vis a vis the ethnoracial composition of its users. Looking back to the Community section of the eBay site, we can see that in addition to links that bring one into the various auction-related discussion boards and chat rooms eBay hosts, this area contains a short text used to introduce the particular concept of ‘eBay Community’ to visitors and prospective members. Accompanying this text, which situates eBay Community under familiar

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neo-iibera! themes like the wonders of entrepeneurism and the virtues of voluntarism, is a cartoon image of a white hand shaking a brown hand. The rationale for using this particular image to signify eBay Community is never given, but perhaps it is safe to surmise that this has something to do with the theme of ‘diversity’, towards which there is nonetheless no allusion in the text itself. There is, however, a certain amount of emphasis on what is referred to as the “variety of people” who “come together on eBay to do more than just buy or sell - they have fun, shop around, get to know one another, and pitch in to help.” Contrary to what we might expect after seeing the pendant image, however, this “variety,’' to the extent that it is addressed at all in the text, is not configured in terms of racial or ethnic or geographic or cultural diversity, but is instead treated according to the distinction “large and small”: on the one side the Community is composed of “individuals buyers and sellers” and “small businesses”: and on the other, we have “even Fortune 100 companies.” How one might “get to know” a Fortune 100 company is never spelled out, but this kind of incongruity is evidently deemed to be not worth taking into account. As the political scientist Langdon Winner has noted about “cyberlibertarian” discourse, there would appear to be a move here to conflate the interests and practices of small time auctioneers with those of businesses like IBM such that “concepts of freedom, rights, access and ownership justified as appropriate to individuals

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are marshaled to support the machinations of enormous transnational firm s."’^ In any case, it is clear that differentiation of types and scales of enterprise is what the management at eBay ultimately has in mind when characterizing the “variety” making up its Community.''® Tellingly, ethnoracial diversity as such appears in the company’s sights principally where it is a question of doing damage control: the section of the site dealing with the policy on Offensive Material. Here we learn that though some of the items offered for sale on eBay might offend shoppers, one of eBay’s great strengths Is diversity of its membership and the items they trade, and eBay believes that it’s important to respect (and learn from) that diversity. That’s why eBay generally permits listings of ‘practically anything on earth’, even items which most of us find offensive.

That being said, the company recognizes that there is something of a contradiction between the essentially libertarian ethos that it wishes to

Winner, p. 323 After eBay launched the U.K. version of the site in July 1999, the company discovered that those who did transactions there tended to make use of the site’s message boards far less frequently than their counterparts on the original site. Seeing this, and noting also that the U.K. operation has thus far been a financial success, an observer is tempted to conclude that the kind of "community" fostered by the message boards is a less essential aspect of eBay than it is often understood to be. More importantly, this location-specific difference in the way that cybercultures operate again suggests that it is crucial to avoid extrapolating from the American experience of the Internet when theorizing about cybercultures in general and manifestations of "community" in cyberspace in particular. On eBay.co.uk, see Cohen, pp. 196-7.

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foster in such a policy, as well as in the extremely broad outline of “basic values" that community members are expected to respect and maintain, and the messier and more mundane realities that may sometimes arise while operating a “true community,” in this case meaning one in which, as the Offensive Material policy statement didactically puts it, “we’re all here to trade, to do business and to have fun with each other.” Under the circumstances it is necessary to prohibit the auction of certain types of material - or example, Nazi paraphernalia - to defend community members from “hate, violence or racial intolerance.” This is framed as a principled response to those who would seek to sell things that contaminate the general “spirit of worldwide community” that otherwise prevails at eBay. A kind of cosmopolitan solidarity-in-commerce is thus to be maintained by eliminating the sale of offensive objects, which is thereby isolated as the unique, and uniquely cultural, impediment to the realization of the eBay Intemational. From the disembodied and decontextualized handshake seen above we now move to a certain sleight of hand, by means of which any other factors that might stand In the way of the actualization of diversity as a functional element of “worldwide community” are conveniently removed from view. Once the most obvious expressions of “hate, violence or racial intolerance” - a category the vagueness of which would not serve to encompass an item like the flag of the U.S. Confederacy, for example - can

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be removed from the site, we are led to believe, the trade/business/fun can go forward untrammeled by compunctions about what all the diversity actually looks like.''® Unsurprisingly, there is no suggestion, ever, anywhere, in any of eBay’s electronic literature that factors like ethnoracially-based social exclusion or global economic inequality have, or might have, any bearing on the constitution of such an allegedly “worldwide community." Such an omission is indeed so unsurprising that it wouldn’t even be worth noting were it not for the fact that in its promotion of community eBay obviously means to Invoke a certain kind of utopian narrative about the Internet, whereby the accession to the version of the “worldwide” that information technology makes possible - that is, for those properly equipped to do so becomes an opening to ground intercultural communication in wholly mutual respect and recognition, independent of any cultural and not-strictlycultural (i.e., geopolitical and global economic) bam'ers to such an outcome. On this score, the cyber-pundit Nicholas Negroponte offers the following: While the politicians struggle with the baggage of history, a new generation is emerging from the digital landscape free of many of the old prejudices ...

” At any rate, it was only in May of 2001 that eBay issued a comprehensive ban on items of this type at the site. Prior to that point, any artifacts of racial supremism more than 50 years old could be offered for sale as 'collectibles'.

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Digital technology can be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony.^”

The idea here would seem to be, again, that digital technology by its very nature can remove the obstacles to realizing “world harmony." The propagation of such a notion is detrimental to the work of accurately reflecting cybercultures not only because it exhibits a fallacious technological determinism, but also because it fails to recognize that notwithstanding the transnational force of the Internet for enabling crosscultural points of contact, the cultural agency of online interlocutors must still for the most part be negotiated according to different, and ideed sometimes vastly different, kinds of more properly local concerns.^^To say that the existence of a transnational Internet culture like that of eBay enables, at least in theory, a broad range of cross-cultural communication is to say one thing; it is quite another to say that this kind of transnationalization of culture will automatically lead to a type of harmonyin-diversity that adequately takes into account the needs and interests of those who, because of where they are inserted into local social fields and/or the inequitable global distribution of power, possess an objectively small share of power to determine the political, economic, and cultural grounds upon which such communication will occur. Any claims for cultural diversity

Negroponte, p. 230

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as universally beneficial are, after all, a good deal less meaningful where it isn't at all clear how all of the parties involved, including the ones who come to it with comparatively little power, can somehow benefit from their involvement. And yet at eBay, for all the talk of community it is impossible to derive from any of the company’s mission-related literature any sense of what “learning from diversity” via eBay trading might look like in practice, beyond knowing which offensive items must be kept at arm’s length. Such is the work, for eBay, of maintaining (worldwide) “community standards.” Outside the eBay site itself, evidence of the company’s external promotion of the idea that it derives its success from the ongoing formation and self-regulation of the eBay community, and the acceptance of this idea beyond the precincts of its own self-affirming public relations material, is not at all hard to come by. In virtually any mainstream news media piece (whether in new or old media formats) addressed to the company’s history and/or future prospects, the writer finds a way to elaborate the theme that eBay is, by virtue of its novel networking structure, a corporate entity to which concepts like “social capital” can be as meaningfully applied as more conventional categories of business analysis like ‘p/e ratio’ or ‘operating margins’. For example, in an April 2002 New York Times encomium to the company’s CEO, Meg Whitman, the writer casually employs the term ‘eBay

See Yudice. 202

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community’ in such a way as to suggest that the socioeconomic Interests of company executives like Whitman and major investors are effectively identical to those of its army of auctioneers. The writer of this article, Saul Hansell, reports that “in 2000, {Whitman] walked away from a $30 billion buyout offer by Yahoo hours before it was to be announced because she felt the eBay community [emphasis mine] was not going to be given enough prominence.”^^ Nowhere in the article is there any sustained suggestion that whatever in the way of substantive relations buyers and sellers may form via their participation in ‘eBay community’ should perhaps not, if the term ‘community’ as it is being employed in this context is to retain anything meaningful about it, be subject to a unilateral determination by the company’s CEO as to what kind of shape, or “prominence", they may assume.^^ Rather than raise any such point, Hansell goes no further than to put the term “eBay community” between irony-indicating quotation marks the first time he uses it. But not to be outdone by this journalist’s willingness to use the concept of ‘community’ to mystify the company’s business practices.

See Hansell. One Salon.com joumallst wrote approvingly of this aspect of eBay in the following terms: "Whitman managed to expand the company without destroying its community, maintaining what she calls 'the small-town feel on a global scale'" (Fox, p.2). Not surprisingly, little is done in the article to specify what is meant by "small town feel," leaving the reader to conclude that the writer is perhaps doing

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elsewhere in the article we see the executive in charge of running the corporation’s American operations assert, without a trace of skeptical response or factual challenge from Hansell, that eBay is “running one of the more empowering social phenomena of the last decade.” This comment is evidently meant to suggest that some broadly beneficial kinds of social practice are occurring in the context of eBay, but at no point does the

speaker ever specify what these might be or why they might be collectively understood as “socially empowering,” We have seen above some initial indication of how users of eBay actually make use of the technologies they can find at the site, and it is clear that this involves, among other things, discussion of the commodities offered for sale at auction therein. In the absence of any elaboration on his part, the executive’s suggestion would appear to be that the mere existence of the interpersonal and economic bonds that may be formed on the basis of these discussions, or the various entrepeneurial or consumerist activities that these can serve to support, is somehow in and of itself “socially empowering” for eBay participants. Here the default position would seem to be that in a situation where ‘community’ (of whatever type) is externally enabled, the targeted beneficiaries find ready access to a form of social empowerment (however sketchily conceived). The concept of community can do the work of justifying the

nothing more than uncritically reproducing the received wisdom about how eBay

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claim for eBay’s "socialiy empowering" effects without itself needing to be explained, since as a shibboleth the term possesses extraordinary and insufficiently examined ideological power. We will return to this point below. In view of the remarks above about the exponential growth of the company, the question of whether eBay was perhaps at one point a largely self-determining community but has by now ‘grown out of it’ intervenes at the point. In Cohen’s The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, the title of which is unironically expressive of a scarcely qualified trumpeting of the company’s singular virtues, we find a narrative devoted to the notion that for the first

few, halcyon years of its operations eBay was a paragon of Web-based community and only incidentally an e-commerce enterprise oriented towards realizing a profit for its founders and operators; in recent years, this narrative runs, eBay has mutated in the direction of its more explicitly competitive corporate counterparts due to the pressures involved in being a publicly traded property, while at the same time striving to retain as much of its original commitment to community as is feasible. Again and again in his text Cohen uncritically conveys the idea that eBay in its early years was the “most genuine community in cyberspace.’’^'^ From having once been the raison d’etre of the company, however, community eventually becomes just

operates. Cohen, p.8

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one aspect of the kind of overall business plan needed to meet the demands of investors and of the market, this change being conceived by Cohen and the representatives of eBay whose views he reports as an inevitable accommodation to the prevailing economic realities, especially after the Nasdaq collapse in 1999. But since Cohen does little to demonstrate that the type of community that eBay promotes was fundamentally different in kind in the few years following the company’s inception than it is now, it is difficult to see why the initial formations of community within eBay should be considered any more laudable than those appearing in more recent times, when representatives of the company can quite openly declare, as they did in late 2002, that to meet future earnings expectations they “have begun focusing more on increasing the activity of existing users.”^ Here the notion that the company’s course of action is largely determined by the community’s preferred ways of using its technology is belied by the fact that, quite expectedly in the context of advanced capitalism, eBay has found itself needing to induce so-called community members to modify their practices to generate new sources for increased revenue, this need being for the most part independent of what the community members would or would not prefer to do. So far from this being a wholly novel development

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related to the company’s growth, however, its professed strategy for development has always appeared to evince little concern for the actual interests of the community beyond the volume of sales carried out within it. In fact, the element of the company’s current game plan mentioned above resonates in significant ways with something that Cohen takes note of in his discussion of the company’s pre-IPO days: the fact that active participants in eBay were in some cases quitting their jobs to sell on the site, and that the leadership at the company was “eager to encourage” this trend.^® In both cases, the company can be seen putting aside its ostensible aim of creating a “perfect market” maximally conducive and responsive to participants’ free and equitable participation in favor of purposive efforts at binding community members’ livelihoods and spending patterns ever more

closely to the company’s pursuit of growth, without any guarantees that their movement towards greater involvement with eBay would thereby provide these ‘community members’ with a significant stake in the community in the future.^^ The sometimes absurd rhetoric about creating a

Schwartz, p. C3 Cohen, pp. 85-86 In his company history, Cohen cites numerous instances in which the company has been reminded of "the importance of including the community in proposed changes to the site" (206). Such instances have typically involved the imposition of new rules for posting listings or the increase of fees, changes to which eBay users have sometimes responded by putting up a substantial amount of resistance. Cohen's take on the company's reaction to this resistance involves implying momentary lapses in judgment on the part of company executives who don’t always fully "understand this community" when deciding to undertake such

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“perfect market” aside (Cohen: “With Labor Day approaching, Omidyar made the program for a perfect marketplace his project for the long weekend.”^®), it is ultimately always a question, for eBay, of acting to bring the operation of the markets the company both oversees and actively shapes into sync with its need to constantly maximize its profits (either short-term or long-range), regardless of whether doing so conflicts with the “free” - or as Bill Gates^® would say, “friction free” - conduct of these markets, or indeed whether in doing so the company completely fails to address ‘externalities’ like community members’ need to secure a relatively reliable means of making a living.®® Further, the notion that eBay’s emphasis on creating “communities of interest” via the application of “relationship technologies” is somehow greatly innovative is belied by the

changes. But to say that some eBay users are capable, by employing various types of collective pressure, of forcing the company to take their interests into account is not the same thing as saying that the company fundamentally depends on the input of the "community" in making decisions about how to run the site or more generally the business. There is little in Cohen's text to suggest that the latter has ever been the case at eBay in any truly notable way. Indeed, in a recent court filing submitted as part of its defense against a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of buyers who had purchased fake sports memorabilia at eBay, the company claimed to be nothing more than the "modern equivalent of the traditional newspaper classified advertisement, automated and accelerated for the twentyfirst century" (Cohen, 309). However expedient this defense may have been, it suggests that the company is quite ready to drop the pretense of community where its financial interests are at stake. Cohen, pp. 19-21 ^ See Gates. For the testament of an eBay seller - a "willing, eager fool for eBay," in her own terms - whose failed entrepeneurial moves on eBay suggest a very different view

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fact that marketers have been focusing on achieving the same ends among specific, targeted groups of consumers since at least the mid-1980s.^^ Thus, the significance that Cohen finds in early manifestations of community at eBay and that leads him to attach the label “genuine” to them seems grossly misconceived when one recognizes that then, as now, the company’s emphasis on “empowerment” and the “efficiency” of markets did not exist in an Internet-enabled vacuum, but was instead very much dependent on and inseparable from the overall logic of capital in this historical conjuncture, according to which iterations of ‘community’ are liable to be recuperated by transnational corporations in line with the need to constantly expand and consolidate their market share.

Community Otherwise: Performing Blackness on the Internet

While the conveniently dramatic tale related by Cohen, one of Internet “idealism” thwarted, or at least diverted, by the irresistible force of

than the company would like to disseminate of vendors' actual experiences with conducting their businesses via the site, see O'Keefe. Rifkin shows, for example, that marketers for Burger King have managed to enroll four million members in twenty-five countries in the Burger King Kids' Club, an entity set up in 1990 in order to "capture the hearts and minds of kids and keep them until they’re 60," as a company representative expressed it (p. 110). For more on "relationship technologies," see Rifkin, pp.97-113

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the market, would seem to be contradicted by some of his own research, It is hardly an isolated example of the nostalgic tendency to treat the relative minimum of corporate incursion on the Internet prior to 1996 or thereabouts as a meaningful indicator of the force of community in shaping the ways that Internet technologies were employed at this time and would later come to be employed. In this frame of reference the ‘good’ Internet, the erstwhile, relatively unexplored and undeveloped Internet notoriously identified with metaphorical terms like “frontier”

and “homesteading”®^, is poisoned by

the noisome arrival sometime in the middle of the decade of transnational corporations and their multitudinous ‘newbie’ customers or potential customers, these latter with in many cases very little technical knowledge or feeling for how the Internet is “supposed” to operate (according to the historical precedent of three decades or less of Internet use).®* Those who

See Kapow and Barlow. “ See Rheingold, 1993. ^ Relevant here are some remarks by Ian Miles, a scholar of technological innovation and social change. In an article called "Towards the Cybereconomy: Making a Business out of Cyberspace," Miles notes that "the wide diffusion of the Internet and the Web in the late 1990s prompted a sea change in attitudes. A wave of enthusiasm for electronic markets gathered strength, and a wide range of new services were established - such as online auctions, consumer aggregation (allowing economies of scale through bulk buying), and search systems allowing for comparison of costs and product features. Such developments helped to give rise to a new image of cyberspace, as the realization of more perfect markets...[but] the libertarian capitalist vision here in many respects is compatible with that of the Wild Web [Miles's term for the Web of the early 90s). All that is required is the introduction of a more entrepeneurial spirit, and a few sheriffs and their deputies to civilize the barbaric early settlers and to tame the outlaws and bandits" (p. 142).

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espouse this line of largely anti-democratic nostalgia are apt to be less interested these days than they were a decade ago in the polltica! meanings or functions of community on the Internet, now that virtue! community is no longer the preserve of the few who got there first. Rheingold, for example, has moved on the Next Big Digital Thing, a phenomenon he refers to as Smart Mobs, these being groups of (mostly young) people in countries with both high (for instance, Japan or England) and low (Nigeria) overall levels of technological development who are able, via mobile communications technologies and pervasive computing, to spontaneously organize and carry out ‘mob’ activities that range from practices of fandom to “swarm-like” political demonstrations to terrorist

conspiracies.^® Frequently cited as an example of this kind of use of text messaging are the concerted efforts by certain young women in Scotland to descend en masse upon a location where England’s Prince William, there to attend college, has been spotted. The “social revolution” that connects ‘texting’ to ‘Wills mania’ notwithstanding, a great many analysts in these precincts have chosen, unlike Rheingold, to remain engaged with the question of how and with what effects collectivist forms of communication

See Rheingold. 2002.

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manifest on the Internet as it is currently empioyed by the vast majority of its mostly sedentary users.®® Indeed, the theme of community continues to be a significant one in the scholarly and popular literature on the Internet. From an early boosterist text like Rheingold’s 1993 The Virtual Community to recent studies by sociologists like Wellman and Calhoun to the skeptical take on the putatively benign or even ‘liberatory’ effects of new forms of virtual communication offered by self-proclaimed “neo-Luddites” Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, analysts have drawn focus to the impact of iCTs on practices and concepts of community.®'' This work has been useful for reflecting concerns and examining assumptions about how, or whether, these technologies have substantially reshaped social life in places where the rate of Internet use has been high or relatively high. One of the drawbacks of such work, however, has been that in the effort to determine how community operates (or fails to operate) in the context of the Internet, too little consideration is given to what underlies the notion of community itself, the meaning of which is often treated as hypostatized rather than as open to examination or critique of any type. The result of this research formation is that the questions asked about the Internet usually pertain to

A recent turn In the sociology of the Internet has been devoted to looking at how it has been integrated into the everyday lives and practice of its users. For examples, see Wellman and Haythomthwaite, and Slater and Miller.

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whether it is ‘good’ for community, and if so, how.® While there is acknowledgment of, and indeed emphasis on, the idea that Internet users’ experience of community may to some extent undergo transmutation when carried out in a virtual setting, there is seldom any suggestion that cybercultural critics might benefit from re-evaluating the already existing suppositions regarding what community is and what it does before proceeding to the question of what a specifically Internet-based type of community is or could be or will be. To put it another way: studies of ‘Internet community’ tend to vault past the underpinnings of community to get to the Internet and the forms of communality it enables. There is reason to believe that the results derived from research of this type will be of rather limited utility. As Calhoun admonishes his fellow scholars of “community without propinquity.” “an emphasis on community by itself can be seriously misleading about both social solidarity generally and the political implications of electronic communication in particular, and needs to be complemented by more direct attention to the social bases of discursive publics that engage people across lines of basic difference in collective identities.”® To this admonition we can add that where it is a question of addressing the phenomenon of eBay, in relation to which, as we have seen

See Rheingold, 1993; Wellman; Calhoun; Robins and Webster A quintessential example of this approach can be seen in the chapter "Can Virtual Communities be Real?" (pp. 79-101) in Etzioni's The Monochrome Society.

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above, the concept of community has been stretched by some commentators to the point where the company can maintain that its way of doing business renders its clientele/sales agents homologous with ‘community’, it is even more important to insist on some interrogation of the concept. As Miranda Joseph notes in her straightforwardly titled Against the Romance of Community, “community is almost always invoked as an unequivocal good, an indicator of a high quality of life, a life of human understanding, caring, selflessness, b e l o n g i n g Y e t at the same time, Joseph acknowledges, a wide range of critical work has been devoted to

analyzing the ways in which the establishment of community in modern times has tended to depend on the universalization of particular forms of communal identity at the expense of other, more marginal types that may or may not occupy an explicitly acknowledged place within the ken of the community as a whole, but are in any case understood to be not ‘organically’ attached to it. The social collectives thereby detached from normative versions of communal identity are liable, in many if not all cases, to wield less power than their counterparts with, as it were, feet more firmly planted on the ground of the universal. Drawing upon the work of Etienne

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Calhoun, pp.374-5 Joseph, p. vii

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Balibar, Joseph identifies this tendency towards universalism in the service of domination with, among other things, racism, and notes that critiques deriving from specifically minoritarian perspectives have been among the most effective in questioning the assumptions surrounding contemporary invocations of community. But while recognizing the importance of this kind of work in the fields of feminism, critical theory and postcolonial theory to challenging hegemonic nationalist and liberal models of community, Joseph, a Marxist with something of a poststructuralist bent, nevertheless remains dissatisfied with the fact that “U.S.-based critics of identity politics have often ... pursued ever more finely grained measures of authentic identity, producing not a critique of community but a proliferation of communities.”^^ So despite the fact that in the U.S. social movements and intellectuals working in the aforementioned fields have managed to wrestle the notion of “community" away from its historical, exclusivist association with the racially white national body, there remains the enormous problem that the contemporary communities formed on the basis of “authentic identity” are not always well equipped to confront the ongoing effects of social inequality rooted in the prevailing realities of political economy. From Joseph’s vantage, it is necessary to do more to estrange and examine

Ibid., p. xiii

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community so that it becomes possible to subject to critique the idea that subjectivity within communities is constituted first and foremost in relation to shared identity rather than to a Jamesonian cultural logic of late capital ism

To demonstrate that the latter is in fact the case, she

investigates a broad range of social and institutional contexts where the discourse of community has been central both to practices of cultural politics and to the ever regenerating operation of capital at the local, national and International levels. These sites include the early and mid 1990s controversy in the U.S. over the National Endowment for the Arts and its role in providing grants to individual artists whose work was publicly proclaimed to be controversial in some way; the history of the nonprofit organization, with an emphasis on the nonprofit theater in San Francisco that the writer worked for at one point; and the ongoing discussion in globalization studies over the status of the local/communal. Joseph finds in her investigations that in each case the work of establishing and representing community is never completely independent from the logic of capital in the historical juncture at hand, and is in fact firmly rooted in processes of subject formation attendant to the configuration of capital in place at the time.

See Jameson 1991.

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With the NEA controversy, for example, Joseph shows that both the Christian Right detractors of the Endowment and the gay and lesbian activists and academics who opposed them depended on voicing their concerns in terms of identity- and faith-based community, without a full or adequate understanding of the way that both their particular demands and their very constitution as collective bodies were shaped by their articulation within larger economic and political frameworks related to the U.S. nation state’s ongoing dismantling of the rudiments of social democracy in conjunction with the expansion of capitalist hegemony in the era of

globalization.'*^ Both sides mobilized around portraying the other as insufficiently tolerant of their own communally-organized forms of life and around referencing the nation-state as the proper container for their own community’s claims on representation, without at the same time recognizing the “structural similarities” in their approaches to responding to the controversy.'*^ The result, Joseph maintains, is that though they were ultimately advancing far different kinds of ideological positions, the two sides ended up in effectively the same place in terms of the political diagnostic they were - or more accurately, were not - able to bring to the conflict. The important point here for our purposes is not that this particular configuration of the political stakes in the NEA controversy limited the effect

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Ibid., p. 119-145

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of these groups’ presentation of their oppositional discourses - indeed, in terms of publicity the opposite might be said to be true

but that for the gay

and lesbian activists, working within such an understanding served to

foreclose possibilities for analyzing how their minoritarian concerns might open out onto still wider and still more pressing problems related to the political economy of globalization and their own collective situation within it. The discourse of community in this case served only to impede, rather than to abet, a critical engagement with some of the key political and economic factors bearing upon both the collective subjectivity of (in this case) sexual minorities and on minoritarian cultural work as such, or so Joseph’s argument runs.

With this in mind, and with the aim of shifting left cultural critics’ focus in their approach to community, Joseph contends that discursive practices of community on the part of minoritarian social actors ought to be understood not primarily in terms of how they allow for mutual support and collective resistance to domination, but instead for how they are tied up with processes of subjectification producing collective bodies which have.in some senses been molded according to the structural demands of capital. Ultimately, Joseph argues, “the work of community is to generate and legitimate necessary particularities and social hierarchies (of gender,

Ibid., p. 144

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nation, race and sexuality) implicitiy required, but disavowed, by capitalism.”'^®So far from being vital constituents of movements for radical democracy in any kind of a priori way, the “necessary particularities” talked about here, to the extent that they are reduced to forms of group identity or “community” grounded strictly on race, gender, sexuality or other such bases, have no more intrinsic orientation towards enacting and sustaining a democratic politics than does Obadike’s blackness-as-consumablepersona. This point will be further addressed below. In the meantime, one should not assume from the foregoing that Joseph opposes collectivity as it organizes engagements with cultural politics; the point is instead that “community” as a ground for doing so must be troubled at the level of its ideological presuppositions. The task of cultural workers aiming to support minoritarian concerns and interests should be, Joseph implies, to draw attention to the limitations of “community” she identifies while at the same time trying to locate opportunities for developing new models of radical democratic theory and praxis that do not depend on the community form for their conceptualization or their enactment. Though at times her argument may seem reductivist - it is hard not to see as overstated a statement like “diversity, like pluralism, is - explicitly

Ibid., p. xxxii

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- a strategy for the expansion of capital”^®- Joseph offers scholars looking at cybercultural community an important opportunity to reconsider some of their assumptions about the meanings and functions of community in

relation to, echoing Calhoun, the “social [and political economic] bases of discursive publics.” Nonetheless, the whole question of how much manifestations of communal identity based in “particularities” are constituted and legitimated vis a vis transnational capital may not at first glance appear especially relevant to consideration of a technoentrepeneurial community like eBay. After all, as we have seen, in its corporate policy eBay tends to steer around concerns about diversity at its site with policies that are largely laissez-faire and with platitudes that stress the importance of a universalized “tolerance.” And in the relative anonymity that characterizes much of the trading on eBay (and on the Internet more generally), it is probably often the case that the particularities to which Joseph refers are left unmarked by the transactors. The discussion lists notwithstanding, it would seem that eBay does not aim in any kind of pointed way at multiplying contexts for the expression of particular (racial, gender-based, sexuality-based, etc.) communal identities. What role, then,

would the particularities of racial or gender or sexual identity have to play in such a context, where the existence of the online community promotes an

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exchange of goods and information that is, at least from the perspective of eBay’s public relations narrative, independent to a significant extent of such factors? Does what Joseph would call the performative work that eBay engages in by facilitating the production of techno-entrepeneuria! or technoconsumerist subject positions depend in any way on the soda! hierarchies that the “romance of community” subtends? And if this is indeed the case, how does one gauge the relationship between community or the effect of community on eBay and the problems Joseph ascribes to the “work of community” as a vehicle for neutralizing and containing collective minoritarian subjectivity and political demands? In order to answer these questions, it will first be necessary to back up a little bit and consider more carefully the role that racial particularity plays in Obadike’s work about eBay. For Obadike to represent race and racial difference as something that needs to be explicitly recognized in the context of information technology cultures is already to enter into another charged area of intellectual inquiry, one that has so far done little to take the Internet into account. In a more general sense, Obadike’s work is concerned with the contemporary status of “race” as a marker of anatomical and cultural difference. Gilroy’s Against Race provides an important example of a pre-eminent cultural critic turning his analytical lens on this topic. Writing against what he sees as the dangers of working from a

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cultural politics rooted in essentialist treatments of racial and ethnic identity, one of his central claims in this text is that “today skin is no longer privileged as the threshold of either identity or particularity” and that “the boundaries of ‘race’ have moved across the threshold of the skin.”^^^ He bases this contention on developments in both science and culture. On the one hand, molecular biology and genetics have challenged the efficacy of “race” as a ground for understanding human diversity. Epidermalization, with its overriding emphasis on skin color as a meaningful indicator of ontological difference, begins to be eclipsed when through the efforts of science the body is “refigured as the transisent, epiphemonenon of coded visible information.”^ Along with this scientific refiguration of the body, there has been in Gilroy’s estimation a change of great consequence in the way that race, or more specifically blackness, signifies in popular culture. Citing among other things the immense international popularity of Michael Jordan as an example, Gilroy maintains that no longer are black bodies subjected to representations that cast them in terms of their putative infrahumanity. Whatever the problems that remain with the way that Jordan or other black celebrities are represented in America and elsewhere, including the adoption of the historically racist notion that “the Negro is only biological” to the corporate multicultural task of projecting a now-valorized black

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Gilroy, p. 47

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corporeality behind the marketing of sneakers or other such commodities, the evident differences between contemporary and earlier economies of the representation of blackness suggest that the “old blackness - too narrowly understood - as American abjection must yield to a new awareness of blackness as a prestigious sign, in particular as a signifier of bodily health and fitness, of human, indeed superhuman, vitality, grace and animal

potency.’"^® In view of the preceding, Gilroy determines that a continuing pursuit of the study of race (‘raciology’) misses the point that race is increasingly becoming outmoded as a nexus within which the diversity of humanity as a whole can be understood and negotiated. On this basis, he advocates a move away from looking to race and critiques of racial injustice as a preponderantly significant element of the grounding upon which progressive political movements of the future ought to be built.

In her critique of Gilroy in the joumal Black Renaissance/Renaisance Noir, Hortense Spillers accuses him of directing his complaints about ‘raciology’ to something of a straw man. She implies that Gilroy disingenuously aims to ‘take on’ those whose focus on race can be classified as single-minded, when the vast majority of Gilroy’s interlocutors in the discussion about the status of the concept of race have positions that

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ibid., p. 47

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are a good deal more nuanced than that of, say, Louis Farrakhan. Indeed, Spiiiers’s most damning charge against Gilroy’s argument is that it lacks subtlety in its suggestion that one can’t be “against race" and at the same time resist the idea of completely jettisoning the analysis of race.®® The consequences of this can be seen in the fact that Gilroy’s vaguely hybridized, “postanthropologicar frame of reference would appear to admit no possibility of continuing to treat or speak about race from within the stillsituated perspective of a properly minoritarian identity, despite his contention that the Duboisian concept of double consciousness must be seen as more relevant than ever in “dense, hybrid, and multiple formations of postcolonial culture in which translation is simultaneously both unremarkably routine and charged with an essential ethical significance," and despite his recognition that it was specifically “black thinkers” who engendered this concept by drawing upon “esteemed traditions of speculative thought from which they were sometimes excluded by racial typology."®’’ In Spiiiers’s more narrowly drawn formulation of this problem in Gilroy’s argument, “vantage pronouncements on the vernacular forms of artistic practice and ‘image world of corporate multiculture’ can no longer be

Ibid., p. 347; In his discussion of the representation of blackness on American television, Herman Gray refers to phenomenon Gilroy analyzes here by using the term "hyperblackness." See Gray. See Spillers. Gilroy, p.77

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declared in the stability of standpoint," even where this would mean that the “essential ethical significance” of acts of cultural translation could no longer be directly attached to the particular perspectives - in this case, African American perspectives - on social relationality derived from direct and indirect experience of racial exclusion.®^ in the cascade of scholarly work on hybridity, the notion that the “stability of standpoint” has been eclipsed is a pervasive one, and Gilroy is therefore hardly alone in asserting that racial identity understood in the most restrictive way no longer affords the same opportunities for grounding a critique of social and cultural Injustice. But there nevertheless remains the dubious implication in Against Race that because race and racial identity are now represented in a manner somewhat different than in the past, there Is no solid basis In the available analytical models of race for understanding or critiquing how these notionally brand new representational economies function. To understand the future (or ‘non-future’) of race, we are unconvincingly told, one must look only to the modes of agency and philosophical dispositions of those comparatively privileged few in the fully

racialized past (including DuBols himself) who In keeping with their hybrid identity and/or cosmopolitan orientation had already begun, according to Gilroy, to move outside of the raciological frame of reference that worked to

Ibid. p. 246

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inhibit their capacity for'self-reaiization. Though Gilroy certainly does not deny the continuing existence of racial hierarchy, he nevertheless appears ready to call upon his fellow scholars to give such priority to modes of hybridity as an object of study that the thorough investigation of such racebased injustice will be largely sidelined. There is thus in Gilroy’s argument something of this insistence on seeing racialization as something that has lost or is rapidly losing its central relevance as a social technology, but it would be incorrect to say that he is entirely uninterested in addressing the concerns of those theorists of race who are less inclined than himself to usher in the already-emerging transcendence of race (however repugnant these latter, like Gilroy himself, find many of the effects of racialization to be). For instance, he describes those who would disagree with him about the virtues of focusing on race as a critical basis for building and refining a left oppositional politics suited to contemporary realities as participating in the “pious ritual in which we always agree that ‘race’ is invented but are then required to defer to its embeddedness in the world and to accept that the demand for justice requires us nevertheless innocently to enter the political arenas it helps to mark out.”“ For all the element of condescension to committed ‘raciologists’ in such a statement, this point bears some affinity with the one that Robyn

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Wiegman makes in her important critique of so-cailed whiteness studies, in which she reads the recent scholarship on whiteness in juxtaposition to the racial politics of the film Forrest Gump. The way that this Oscar-winning film uses the main character’s experience of social exclusion in the mid-century American South to “imagine a nonessentialist whiteness only by shifting the signification of segregation from an emblem of black oppression and white material privilege to a form of white injury” demonstrates, for Wiegman, that a poorly calibrated politics of racial identity, in this case focused on whiteness, can just as easily shore up white racial privilege as mark out some kind of progressive alternative to it.^ For both Gilroy and Wiegman, albeit In different ways and to somewhat different ends given their differing focal points - surely, for Wiegman, the politics of minoritarian subjects’ asserting their racial particularity would have a greatly different cast than the treatment of whiteness in whiteness studies - the “paradox of particularity” can serve to disable as much as buttress the aims of those who situate their would-be anti-racist politics squarely within the realm of a still insufficiently interrogated racial identity. Gilroy’s project may thus not be limited, as Spillers maintains, to displacing race as an object of analysis, but also appears to involve an attempt to underscore some of the perils of

Ibid.. p.52 “ Wiegman, p. 125

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locating racial identity solely and strictly on the meretricious ground of particularity. What hopefuliy has emerged so far in this section of the chapter is that there are compelling grounds for critiquing community as it has been narrowly conceived in terms of identarian particularity, in this case racial particularity, but that at the same time the refusal of the “stability of standpoint," with a corresponding inattention to the “epistemic status of cultural identity” as this intersects with race, is something that should not be proceeded to, even in a theoretical vein, without further careful reflection One of the virtues of a work like Blackness for Sale is that it allows us to examine the above dichotomy - between the valorization of identity-based forms of community and the promotion of non-particular hybridity as a more valid and current basis for the organization of political collectivities - in the light of the practical experience of contemporary African Americans, or in any case those African Americans whose perspectives have some affinity with that of the artist. The gap referred to at the beginning of the chapter between, on the one hand, Obadike’s situated take on the salient features of being black in 1990s America and, on the other, the ironic purveyance of signs of blackness as free-floating and highly valuable commodities in the marketplace of identity, serves to point to some of the problems that arise

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on both sides of the community-hybridity dichotomy. When seen strictly through the lens of racial particularity, Obadike’s consumable black persona seems very much akin, as suggested above, to Joseph’s framing of community (and those communal identities recognized as such) as effectively a depoliticized artifact of transnational capitalism. To hold up this version of blackness as the principal foundation for cohesive political action

among African Americans importantly sharing certain collective concerns and interests would of course seem absurd. If blackness is seen as something readily, indeed immediately, transferable to anyone with a consumer’s avidity for identifying with and adopting selected aspects of the ‘African American persona’ as it has been socially constructed, there is little reason for seeing it as a meaningful basis for abiding solidarity among black people. Meanwhile, however, the location of African American communal identity strictly in terms of the commonly-experienced everyday realities that accompany inhabitation of racially black identity seems to ignore the question of how race is continually being reproduced in, among other ‘political arenas,’ the realm of cultural politics. To simply recite Obadike’s lists of predicaments familiar to many African American people vis a vis racialization as in and of themselves sufficient grounds for collective identity AKA community would be to avoid engaging with the crucial notion that

^ See Mohanty’s discussion of this concept in her article of the same name.

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blackness is, like other forms of racialized identity though usually in a more charged way (at least in the U.S.A.), perpetually subject to the types of social and cultural reinscription that Gilroy has so trenchantly addressed. In Blackness for Sale, neither identarian community nor free-floating hybridity seem to provide an adequate conceptual basis for understanding the complexity of African-American identity. But beyond the fact that Obadike provocatively rehearses longrunning discussions among cultural workers about the status of identity

politics and cultural hybridity, and that by doing so in the manner of Blackness for Sale he brings specificity to problems that are sometimes treated in terms that are unhelpfully abstract, his work in this piece accomplishes the still more urgent aim, as far as this chapter is concerned, of inviting reflection on how the discourse of community in and around eBay is related to the ongoing reconfiguration of the composition and contours of ethnoracial identity and community in this historical moment.®® There has been some discussion above about how race is often treated both by eBay’s practitioners and by outside commentators as something essentially extraneous to the operation of the auction network. At the same time, however, there has been an effort to show that in various ways eBay’s promotion of community carries with it - sometimes somewhat cryptically,

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sometimes more transparently - an orientation towards racial diversity that at least potentially bears upon the way that auction and discussion list participants conduct their activities at the site. Blackness for Sale is a noteworthy example of minoritarian cultural work on the Internet to the extent that, inter alia, it offers a critique of the general orientation towards race characteristic of the important cybercultural site that is eBay. This critique may be seen to proceed from a recognition that eBay’s version of community is predicated on its members incorporating a set of dispositions akin to what Aiwa Ong identifies as the bases for Asian immigrants’ accession to symbolic whiteness in the U.S.; a capacity for entrepeneurial endeavors, along with ‘self-control’ and the achievement as a group of the requisite level of consumer activity. However erroneous it is to associate these characteristics with whiteness as a racial category, Ong shows, it has consistently been the case in the U.S. that immigrants have been subject to a determination of their fitness for inclusive cultural citizenship based on their perceived degree of correspondence, as an entire, undifferentiated, ethnoracial body, to these ideological coordinates of normative whiteness.®^ Their inclusion or exclusion from the compass of

On the "changing meaning of race" in present day U.S.A., see Omi. Honig, however, maintains that ’model immigrant' status tends to be conferred on the basis of certain groups' notional embodiment of 'family values,' rather than in response to any more immediately economic concerns. She also shows that these very terms of acceptance are liable to be turned against immigrants when

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whiteness as a socially normative category in turn bears in important ways on the very constitution of these immigrants as hyphenated Americans and potential U.S. political actors, a process Ong calls “cultural citizenship as subject making.”®®Meanwhile, African Americans have been cast in this model of assimilation to whiteness qua cultural norm as the constantly marginalized domestic Other, one whose own preclusion from acceding to whiteness (as a group) operates as something of a baseline against which other racial and ethnic groups’ proximity or lack of proximity to symbolic

whiteness can be measured. However much may be said to have changed in the last decade or two in the purchase (and marketability) of African American culture and those cultural practices directly identified with it, this much has by and large remained the same.®® Where “ the United States of eBay” is concerned, it is axiomatic that the only ground of any real pertinence for participants’ involvement is their capacity to embody and support the entrepeneurial ethos. Community members’ particular cultural and/or race-connected perspectives on the work of eBay commerce are ultimately irrelevant insofar as they depart from what is understood to be the ‘practical business’ of maintaining the enterprise. This does not mean that such 'practical business’ does not at

various kinds of political actors require a scapegoat for what they see to be the ills of American society. See Honig, pp. 73-106.

See Ong.

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the same time include for the typical community member a range of expressive possibilities related to his willingness to partake in consumer affinity groups. When referenced against eBay community as a whole, however, these potential sites for the expression of and reflection on difference, including racial difference, appear liable to be submerged beneath the specious adequation of the “perfect marketplace" with “social empowerment.” In other words, what matters at eBay, what is pushed to the fore in its discourse of community, is a kind of subject making (or remaking) that explicitly valorizes the market as primary ground for social solidarity, while implicitly treating various kinds of difference amongst community members, whether having to do with race, ethnicity, culture, class, gender, sexual orientation or any other type, as readily collapsible into a kind of collective enterprise bearing a remarkable resemblance in certain respects to Ong’s whiteness-as-cultural-norm. Whether the presence of Black Americana at the site should, according to this analogy, be seen as evidence of a (not very) tacit devaluation of African American culture and cultural identity in this context is to some extent uncertain, but definitely troubling in its implications. In any case, the foregoing is not meant to declare that eBay is somehow definitionally or by design a sociocultural space wherein whiteness is the unavowed norm, but merely that the role of

Carney et al, pp. 10-11

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presumptive whiteness, and more generally the work of racialization, in eBay trading communities merits more attention than it has so far been given by cultural workers. Obadike’s response to this state of affairs is to perform ‘this blackness’ on eBay. Offered as both, or neither, a situated, autobiographical response to a collective, African American experience of racial identity and a ‘disembedded’ cultural artifact consumable by anyone with a will to do so, Obadike’s auctioning of this blackness ends up focusing not on an essentialized identity rooted in a particular race-based community nor on a putative transmutation of race and racial identity into something preponderantly ‘cultural,’ and thereby no longer properly raced, but instead on something else altogether: an articulation of race as social relationality, something that has been thus far occluded not only at eBay, but also to a considerable degree in many of the other cultural forums of cyberspace. This element of an interpretation of Obadike’s piece draws upon the concept of “performing blackness” as it has been addressed by a variety of scholars of late, most notably by Saidiya Hartman in her text on the legacy of U.S. slavery and its disciplinary regimes for the latter day conceptualization of black subjectivity. Using a reading of the spectacularized display of slaves in the antebellum American South, including that of the auction block, and its long-resonating aftereffects as

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her basis, Hartman addresses contemporary blackness as above all a phenomenon of “soda! relationality rather than identity,” something that doesn’t comprise only a racial identity but instead “incorporates subjects normatively defined as black, the relations among blacks, whites, and others, and the practices that produce racial difference.”®®Hartman maintains that it is important to address blackness in these terms because modes of racialization in the U.S. have always, since the days of the auction block, borne an important, often explicitly pronounced relation to the process of establishing the social, political, and cultural parameters of American subjectivities, including but not limited to black subjectivities. To conceive of the contemporary performance of blackness in relation to the way that access to selfhood and enfranchisement has historically been legislated in America according to the dynamics of racialization is to emphasize that it is not only the racial identity of people “normatively defined as black” that is in question in the various U.S. social and cultural iterations of blackness, but that the subjectivity of each and every member of the American society is bound to be significantly affected by the way that the meanings of blackness are produced in the contested field of racial politics. Unquestionably, it is African Americans who in the aggregate must deal with the harshest effects of this process, but no one in America,

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regardless of his/her skin color, can pretend to remain entirely apart from it. Ultimately, then, the accent here is less on the negotiation of racial identities within the boundaries of discrete, racially-defined communities than on the social and political processes - among which Hartman highlights “displays of power, the punitive and theatrical embodiment of blackness, the discursive re-elaboration of blackness, and the affirmative deployment and negation of blackness in the focus on redress” - via which the whole white-dominated complex of racial formations takes shape in the U.S.®'’ In the case of Obadike, what the artist offers eBay users, as well as others in the cybercultural audience for his piece, is an opening to consider how much the discourse and practices of eBay community have functioned to deflect consideration of the structural role of race in reproducing the kind of American social hierarchies, organized in part according to a logic of race-as-community, that Joseph, Ong and Hartman respond to in their work. The proponents of the would-be race-neutral model of community to be found at eBay not only appear to ignore such concerns, but project a form of virtual communality wherein problems and concerns related to race

have somehow been transcended, at least where the eBay trading community is concerned. What we must recognize about any such claims

Ibid., p.57

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for community-beyond-race is how much they have been a constant and largely unexamined feature of the Internet discourse since its inception. Over a decade ago, to invoke a rather infamous example, Rheingold chose to celebrate the supposedly liberatory character of Internet community in his well-known text on the topic by focusing on the anonymity option attaching to communication in cyberspace. “Because we cannot see one another in cyberspace, gender, age, national origin, and physical appearance are not apparent unless a person wants to make such characteristics public,” he wrote,®^ Aside from the fact that race and ethnicity are unaccountably left out of this list (unless “physical appearance” is meant to serve as a kind of euphemism), something that needs to be mentioned here is that the writer leaves unconsidered this observation’s flipside, which is that unless the characteristics he names are made public the person in question is in many quadrants of cyberculture liable to be automatically taken for a young white American, likely male, probably heterosexual. Any consideration of the consequences of assumptions such as these for cyberculture participants (particularly the Americans among them), who are left to envision their activities as completely outside the ken of an otherwise ubiquitous racialization of social life, or for the work of explaining cybercultures, which work is now to proceed without any reference to so important a category of

Rheingold, 1993, p.26

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soda! and cultural identity as race, is left aside by Rheingold and a good many other cyber-analysts. And while at eBay the panoply of discussion lists, among other factors, makes it less likely that such assumptions about participants’ whiteness will prevail across the board, it is no less the case therein that as a general, practical expectation - which expectation, again, is in no way discouraged by eBay’s brand managers - racial difference is to be unmarked. The upshot of this bracketing of racial difference is not, when viewed through Obadike’s optic, that members of eBay community are (or will be) able to form a collective, cybercultural identity independent of the vicissitudes of racialization, but merely that opportunities for community members to reflect on how the presumptive whiteness of cyberculture a la Rheingold remains very much a phenomenon of racial inequality will be truncated. As a result, eBay community as now constituted will be more likely to work to sustain the social hierarchies Joseph connects to the discourse of community than to find a way around re-installing this problem. Blackness for Sale works to show that if race as a social relation is notionally absent from eBay community, this is by no means an indication that it is genuinely not germane in this context due to the relative anonymity of the participants. Nor is it simply a sign pointing towards the regrettable persistence of the ‘digitial divide,’ according to which the American block of the Internet population is still disproportionately white. Instead, Obadike

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suggests, the reality of racialization is veiled at eBay in line with a more widespread tendency in contemporary American social and political life to “whitewash race,” especially where it is not simply a question of recognizing, or maintaining the pretense of recognizing, the cultural value of racial identities and communities but of acknowledging the constitutive place of race in a whole host of the most vital and immediate political concerns in present day America.®^ In the alternative to the whitewashing frame of reference, race is not something reducible to the ‘merely cultural,’ but instead is taken as one of the fundamental bases upon which the U.S. political order, with its manifestly race-informed power differentials among social actors, is reproduced and maintained. If, Obadike’s work proposes, eBay users can be brought to perceiving their practices and discourse of cybercultural community as importantly related to white privilege deriving from structured racial inequality, then perhaps some of them can draw from this insight “new opportunities to make sense of their political location and to recognize a degree of agency in challenging (and therefore changing) the many ways in which the beneficiaries of racial hierarchy are complicit with

injustice.”®’* Any such outcome will meanwhile be considerably complicated by the substantial advantages to be enjoyed by those who retain rather than (try to) renounce their “possessive investment in whiteness,” a notion to

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See Brown et al

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which Obadike’s work appears to allude when with sharp irony it treats blackness as a “property" with a far more ambiguous and unsettling set of benefits attached to it than those objectively accruing to whiteness.®®

It is Obadike's referencing of a kind of occluded social relation of race at eBay that, I would maintain, makes his project truly inadmissible for the site’s gatekeepers. The artist himself has pointed out the irony of his project being summarily thrown off eBay - his auction listing was removed from eBay by site administrators after only four days for being “inappropriate” - when a vast variety of racist material is traded there on a daily basis.®® Alongside of this highly pertinent observation we can recognize that Obadike, like Fred Wilson, “reminds the public that the history of art and artifacts [of so-called Black Americana] not only is a history of aesthetics and material culture, but also includes a history of human lives and the epistemological networks within which those lives are understood and represented.”®^ What might be added to this formulation so as to make it fit more closely to Obadike’s piece is that with Blackness for

Ware, p. 31 See Lipsitz In a 2001 interview with Coco Fusco, the artist declares himself "a little shocked that a company like eBay that sells ceramic coons and mammies, African exotica, and Nazi paraphernalia would shy away from [his] project." For her part, Fusco notes that Obadike is the only one of the artists who has used an eBay auction prospectus as a kind of para-performance site to have had his auction terminated by eBay. See Fusco, 2001a. Gonzalez, p. 31

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Sale it is also a question of the artist’s performatively re~siting as Net art ‘artifact’ his own inhabitation of the social relation that constitutes blackness. Such an artifact is offered as something that points towards the implications of this soda! relation for the human lives and epistemological networks developed through, among other things, their connection to eBay’s operation and, more widely, the cultures of the Internet. What would it mean, Obdike’s piece appears to ask, for cybercultural community to become less like eBay and more like a venue through which participants might come to question how their own racial identities are located in relation to the overall complex of U.S. racialization within which blackness, whiteness, and other racial categories are given shape? We might say, indeed, that Obadike’s ironic artifact is meant to stand as the intentionally unsatisfying alternative to a rich and engaged cultural politics now absent from the orbit of eBay, and from many of the other sites of Internet culture. Where the work of eBay trading communities would tend to expel or at least bracket dealing in this type of artifact, Obadike’s intervention insists on seeing ‘this blackness’ as something that can and must be ‘re-collected’ in another frame of reference, one that makes the politics of race bear in a meaningful way upon the shape and operation of cybercultures.

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Re-storing Racial Histories In the Cultures of Inforrnation Technology: Keith Piper’s Relocating the Remains, Database Technologies, and the Challenge to Racialized Social Surveillance

The last chapter deals with another Afrodiasporic artist whose work is likewise concerned with investigating the topos of contemporary minoritarian cultural identity as it is mediated within the practices and discourses attached to the Internet and ICTs of the present. Keith Piper began his career at the beginning of the 1980s with his inclusion in two exhibitions featuring the young artists belonging to what came to be known as the BLK Art Group. These two shows, called Black Art an’ Done (1981) and Pan-Afrikan Connection (1982), aimed to contest the tendency in the British art world of the time to assign too little relevance to race as a factor in both cultural production and in the composition of the cultural identities of U.K. inhabitants. As Mercer explains, this conception of culture “was not only exclusionary in rendering ‘race’ invisible, but implicitly nationalisf as well, and the artists of the BLK Art Group strove to provide an alternative, race-informed vision of contemporary British life. Piper continued to be

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associated with the BLK Art Group until its mid-1980s dissolution. In the subsequent period, he concentrated on producing paintings the critical thrust of which was meant to correspond to what British cultural studies texts of the late 70s and early 80s like Policing the Crisis^ and The Empire Strikes Back^ were saying about racial injustice and the attack on the social

welfare state in the U.K. under the rule of the Tories and Margaret Thatcher (as well as under Labour in the immediately preceding period).® In one of the most well-known of these, for example. Piper painted a wall-size mural entitled The Nanny of the Nation Gathers Her Flock {^987), the focal point of which was a rendering of Mrs. Thatcher ironically crowned with a battery of nuclear missiles. It was during this period that Piper’s work began to gain a certain amount of prominence in England for its capacity to represent concerns that, via the interventions of the BLK Art Group and the Birmingham scholars amongst others, were now being given greater attention in the British arts scene. By the time the 1990s arrived, Piper had shifted to presenting works in information technology-abetted multimedia. The piece that will be the focus of the discussion here, an unusual 1997 retrospective re-presentation of much of the art produced by Piper in the previous decade, is titled

See Hall et al. ^ See Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, ®Mercer 1997, p. 23

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Relocating the Remains. The work involved putting together in tri-partite fashion ~ in the form of a gallery display, CD-ROM, and website - a variety of Piper’s ventures into the field of 1990s U.K. and Afrodiasporic cultural politics. These various interventions were collectively oriented towards critically commenting on the historical and contemporary treatment of African diasporic subjects by the state and its most powerful clients as objects of uniquely harsh and systematic modalities of social discipline. In one of the gallery display sections of Relocating the Remains, for example, Piper re-combines two older video works, Surveillances: Tagging the Other and The Exploded City, to augment his earlier commentaries about the role of state-directed surveillance in the racialized policing of urban spaces. Thus, in Relocating the Remains the re-ordered assemblages of discrete works from Piper’s past were meant to be seen not simply as offering a forum for the reconsideration of his oeuvre, in the manner of a typical retrospective exhibition, but in fact as part of a brand new work entailing an investigation of the use of database and surveillance technology in both the reproduction and the contestation of racialization in social life and visual culture. The “remains” to be “relocated” were both those of Piper’s own cultural work in new media and those of the visual record of white racial domination in its historical trajectory up to the present day, when information technologies play an increasingly significant role in the work of

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maintaining a racially inequitable social order in places like the U.K. and the U.S.A.

Both the gallery installation, which was first staged at The Royal College of Art in London in 1997 under the auspices of the Institute of International Visual Arts (InlVA), and the Internet component of the piece consisted of three parts. In the installation, these were variously titled “Unrecorded Histories” (in which audiences were invited to sit behind an antique desk meant to evoke "authority and hierarchy"^ and interact with, via clicks on a mouse, works showing images of, among other things, the African slave trade of the 18®’ and IQ®’ centuries); “Unclassified” (in which the audience encountered shelves stacked with boxes for filing archival documents and monitors for retrieving images ((principally)) of black subjects targeted for police surveillance on the basis of their race); and “Another Arena” (in which floor-to-ceiling image displays of black athletes serve as a mock 'arena' in which can be interrogated the particular kind of fame typically accorded to the such athletes, an "acclaim constrained by a

This description comes from the curator’s text prepared by Dan Cameron at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, where I caught the show.

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sense of fascination with the black body, reverberating with echoes of the ’exotic’ [and] rendering it as other."® In the Internet component of the work, the three sections were titled "The exhumation of an unmarked body"; "The archiving of an unrecorded history"; and 'The observation of an unclassified presence." In all of these, Piper makes use of Shockwave, a multimedia technology® for the Web, to animate certain of the figures he displays, thus appearing to emphasize the images' fragmentary nature by causing them to move in somewhat unstable ways. The "exhumation" section, for example, consists of a series of anthropometric terms listed down the screen (The look of...; The volume of The texture o f ...; The size o f ...; The structure o f ...; etc.) juxtaposed to both still, archival, 19®’ century images of 'primitives' accessed by clicking on these terms and a Shockwave image, at the bottom of the screen, of a brown body appearing to be either in cross section or in a coffin, with various parts of the body blinking in different patterns. The "archiving" section uses Shockwave to animate a 19®* century French abolitionist painting of the slave trade (in Sierra Leone) so as to emphasize the chaos of the scene depicted and to pull the image out of the remoteness of the

®Rohini Malik of InlVA suggests this reading of "Another Arena" in a text published at the Relocating the Remains web site. See

®Shockwave also allows for the use of video and audio in web sites; Piper uses it mainly for animation, with a few minor audio effects.

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archive into a more immediate engagement with the present. The movement in the image here becomes a way of inviting the audience member to actively "recorc!" this archival image in a frame of reference that refuses to file it away as an emblem of a distant and dormant past of racial oppression. Finally, the "observation" section, which with the titles set at the top and bottom of the screen (Mark this site . . . N O GO) comments

reflexively on the use of surveillance to police urban spaces, employs a Shockwave image of a composited brown face (including that of the artist’s own face) floating around the screen while being 'pursued,' and periodically 'assaulted' by, the sweep of a camera scanning a section of otherwise anonymous city space. This is accompanied by a strip of x-rayed images of young black men appearing to be led away from a police arrest. In this case, the animated image helps to contextualize the still images; the tabloid media's oft-repeated image of young black men being led away in handcuffs is now to be seen in juxtaposition to the effective dispossession of such men, via the relentless law enforcement monitoring of their urban neighborhoods, of civil liberties too often taken for granted by those who are not subjected to this kind of policing. As elsewhere in the web site's representational economy, then, the aim in this section would seem to be to re-frame images of racially subordinated subjects by taking them out of their

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archival (or 'archive-ready') or social surveillance contexts white offering instead a minoritarian perspective on their meanings and resonances/

Despite the fact that much in the foregoing description of Relocating the Remains might not summon up sanguine thoughts about the future development of racialzation, the cumulative effect of Piper’s work, especially the material presented in the 1990s, is to "reveal [ | how the very crisis of traditional categories of ‘race’ and nation has, paradoxically, given rise to a space in which new cultural identities and imagined communities, such as those of Black Britain, have flourished.”®Thus, in a work like The Nation's Finest, included in the "Another Arena" section of Relocating the Remains, Piper is able to offer a critical representation of a certain black heterosexual masculine ideal that is both reflective about the limitations of this ideal attendant to the historical and contemporary treatments of the black male subject in the dominant culture as violent and/or hyper-

sexualized, and generative in taking the ambivalent appeal, “the dynamics of fear and fantasy,”^ connected to black male athleticism and corporeality

^ The focus of discussion in this chapter will be Piper's work at the web site; for more discussion of the gallery aspect of the work, see Mercer 1997; and for more about the CD-ROM, see Dawson. Both also provide astute analyses of the work as a whole. ®ibid., p.15 ®ibid.. 55

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as a starting point towards finding a more viable ideal to correspond to reconceived - but not ‘post-racial’ - forms of hybridized cultural identity. That is to say, Piper looks both to criticize the way the biack male athiete

has been represented and to try to draw from this simultaneously celebratory and stigmatizing representation one important basis for more carefully understanding the "complex matrix of presence, visibility and sexuality" out of which future modes of black masculinity will be formed. Piper is thus occupied with the question of how to take up an examination of the available models of racial (and national) identity in the context of trying to locate and elaborate "new cultural identities." Similarly, the fact that in Relocating the Remains Piper structures the work by setting up the categories ‘Unclassified’, ‘Unmapped’, and ‘Unrecorded’ to address problems of race and disciplinarity does not serve simply as an ironized lamentation over the relentless mapping, classifying and recording of the racialized subject that has in fact been carried out in the course of the last two centuries. There is, of course, an effort to focus attention in this direction and to allow for reflection on how racialization has at every stage proceeded with the buttressing of science and technology (in however compromised a form these may have taken). But the work is not limited to focusing perspectives around this particular theme. Nor is it simply

Piper, qtd. in Mercer 1997, p. 55 249

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a matter of representing the occluded histories of those racialized subjects perceived by colonizers and dominant, metropolitan cultures to be peripheral, or indeed exterior, to modernity throughout much of its course. While Piper is in fact concerned to do such work, his use of the above named framing categories in Relocating the Remains ultimately gestures towards something else, something more forward-looking: an invitation to work on developing new, as-yet-unmapped approaches to inhabiting race­ conscious cultural identities in conjunction with the deconstruction of

traditional forms of ‘racial knowledge.’ Piper's intervention operates as minoritarian cultural work designed to show, or perhaps simply to associatively suggest, the way forward to those who want to look at how information technology might be made to engage with race and racial identities in ways that support, rather than undermine, the conception of socially and culturally just alternatives to the racial projects of the past and present. The prefix ‘un’ here evokes the hopeful possibility of moving towards a future where the coordinates of cultural interaction can be re­ plotted so as to displace the race-based social and cultural inequality that has been attached to, and in some cases has proceeded from, the technologically enabled mapping, classifying, and recording of those subjected to the burdens of racialization. Inasmuch as Piper’s art beckons in this fashion to the ‘user’ to participate in the ‘unmaking’ of the work of

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racialization as it is connected to work of technocultures, we can discern here something of a utopian impulse behind the work, an actively politicized futurity. And more particularly because this art has invoked this kind of futurity via a work of net art, it clearly merits the attention of scholars interested in addressing the utopian dimension of cybercultures. A discussion of Piper’s work as it intersects with and in some ways departs from the aims and methods of the avowedly future-oriented cultural work associated with the concept of Afrofuturism will take up the last third of this chapter. Another reason that it is especially important to talk about Piper in the context of this dissertation, with its emphasis on the capacity of minoritarian cultural work to work on and point towards a future re-framing of certain untenable understandings of race and identity on the Internet, is that the artist has been treated by at least one critic as a retrograde emblem of a kind of an overly didactic race conscious aesthetic that has allegedly been superseded in its capacity to respond to the contemporary politics of race by work that is less straightforward in its approach to reflecting and commenting on the complexities of racial identity. In her scathing review of Relocating the Remains in The Guardian, Rachel Withers lays out this view in the following manner: “Piper is of a generation of political artists whose uncompromised polemics on race first attracted attention in the early 1980s.

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Then, 'aesthetics’ was a dirty word...Cultural politics has moved on.”^"' The emphasis in this critique is laid jointly on the putative lack of aesthetic merit in Piper’s work and on the artist’s choice to present his subject matter in a manner that is too overtly and unsubtly politicized - indeed, the title of the vitriol-laden review is “Slave to Dogma.” This kind of summary criticism of race-conscious artwork that makes its points in a somewhat confrontational manner is not uncommon among commentators who give unambiguous priority to aesthetic merit, a category of critical judgment that is itself seldom examined for its ideological underpinnings, in delivering their pronouncements on the state of contemporary art."'^ But whatever it is that motivates such a dismissal of artwork that pointedly addresses racial injustice, one thing that is for certain is that the critical attempt to peel apart minoritarian cultural politics and aesthetic production is bound to have a greater, and likely more greatly detrimental, effect on artists of color than on their white counterparts. Whether or not a critic of Withers's stripe would be at all distressed at such a prospect, the contention here is that her

” Withers, qtd. in Doy, p.204 Witness Schjeldahl's retrospective remarks, as vague as they are hyperbolic, about the "Cromwellian" cultural politics of American art of in the 1990s: "The reign [in that period] of hectoring instaliations and photo-and-text critique was nightmarish for art lovers...Farewell to all that. Political correctness and theorythink have receded from the art world to their norma! streambeds in the universities, where academics seem to be recovering their traditional indifference to contemporary art, one way or the other." It should hardly be surprising that zero reflection is undertaken here about the implications of this reaction against political

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intervention pooriy serves the interests of those oriented toward moving forward the examination of race as a key feature of culture and cultural identity.

In the meantime, among other critics who have specifically addressed Piper’s work, the charge of occasional didacticism (mainly in the older work) has not been absent, but what is more apposite in this discussion than weighing in on the aesthetic virtues of Piper’s oeuvre is understanding how a work like Relocating the Remains fits into contemporary debates about the status of race, cultural politics and information technologies.’^ In the discussion that follows, the implicit argument will be that quick and easy dismissals of a work like Relocating the Remains on the basis of its alleged aesthetic impoverishment are simply counter-productive for anyone trying to understand how it resonates with these debates. Withers’s criticisms miss the point of Piper’s work to the degree that they fail to take account of its most important dimension, which is not simply the exhibition of various kinds of politically charged art objects but instead a conceptual engagement with the organization and dissemination of information about race and racial histories in the context of the new media. In other words, in her pat dismissal of Relocating the

art for minoritarian cultural workers who continue to recognize a need to confront and critique racialization in their work. See Schjeldahl.

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Remains as passe for what she sees as its agit-prop oriented representation of forms of racial injustice, Withers appears to overlook the fact that what she disparages, whether tenably or otherwise, is only one aspect of the work, and that the work as whole cannot be understood without reference to Piper’s strategy of assembling various elements of earlier pieces into a recombinant project designed to provide its audience with an opportunity to examine contemporary technologies through the lens of resurgent racial histories. Indeed, offering a view of Piper’s body of work that widely diverges from the dismissive one delivered up by Withers, Mercer writes that (w)hile British art over the last fifteen years has seen a gradual withdrawal from the “big picture” themes that once defined the genre of history painting, what distinguishes Piper’s own positioning at the crossroads between postmodernism and postcolonialism is the diligence of his persistent curiosity about the ways in which our vexed and troubled relationship to the memories, myths and narratives that constitute the collective past continues to inform the interpretation of present predicaments.^”*

Mercer, for example, also levels a qualified version of this charge. See Mercer 1996, p. 164. Ibid., p. 164

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In Mercer’s frame of reference, which is akin to the one presented in this dissertation, the constancy of Piper’s attention to tracing the connections between historical logics of racialization and the emerging technologies of the present, exemplified by something like Relocating the Remains, is seen to be one of its distinct virtues, especially in an environment where, for whatever reasons, the great majority of other British artists have been far less involved in doing this kind of work.’®This dissertation as a whole is likewise oriented towards recognizing and interpreting the contributions of those, like Piper, who have striven in their work to maintain a critical focus on the role that race plays or might play in the popular use and understanding of information technologies, while also giving consideration to some of the ways in which such technologies have been and continue to be involved in reproducing some of the various racialized features of social life.

in an interview. Piper notes. "Although this project [Relocating the Remains] began life principally as a gallery based interactive installation project with accompanying CD Rom, I found myself becoming increasingly irritated by the attitude of galleries for whom issue based work from a black perspective is no longer fashionable. Therefore making work to be placed onto the WWW becomes a strategic way in which artists who are denied access to the art world mainstream can distribute work and build audiences, especially as access to the internet is becoming less and less the exclusive preserve of the enfranchised," See Flint.

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Databases and Cybercultyres

One of the conceptual signposts that initially drew me into the project of examining minoritarian cultural work in and on information technologies was the new media curator Steve Dietz’s article “Memory_Archive„Database,” a piece devoted to identifying and drawing attention to some of the most noteworthy tendencies in contemporary net and postconceptual art."*® To do so Dietz discusses artworks like Beth Stryker and Sawad Brooks’s “DissemiNET,” which uses the Web to collect stories about “displacement and dispersal” vis a vis political oppression in El Salvador; Antonio Muntada’s “File Room,” in which the artist collects and archives on the Web documents that have been censored in various places around the world; and Fred Wilson’s “A Road to Victory,” the artist’s critical commentary on the historical self-representation of New York’s Museum of Modern Art through its photo archive. Dietz’s aim in focusing on these and other artists is to demonstrate the prevalence of the construction and manipulation of databases and archives in the new media-based art of the present. All of the artists encompassed by Dietz’s overview both make use

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of the information technologicai resources enabling the composition of databases and at the same time offer a critical perspective on some of the more conventional applications of such technologies. And although Dietz doesn’t focus on this aspect of the work as such, it should be evident from the description of the three works above that some of the more important database or archive-oriented cultural production that he discusses has a pointedly, self-consciously political bent to it.

While Dietz makes a pretty convincing case that this ‘archival turn’ in new media cultural production merits critical attention, much of the literature dealing with the cultural politics of information technologies has said nothing at all about the status of the database in cyberspace, while some of the most prominent texts that have attempted to address this matter have suffered from serious weaknesses. In her introduction to The Cyborg Handbook, for instance, Donna Haraway makes it clear that in her view “lives are at stake in the curious quasi-objects called databases: they structure the informatics of possible worlds, as well as all-too-real ones.”^’’ Though it veers uncomfortably close to technological determinism, this insight about the way that technologies employed to collect and organize data serve to condition not only the material circumstances of everyday life

There has been far too little writing about this topic, in view of which this brief yet suggestive article should be seen as an important addition to the literature on new media art. See Dietz.

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but also those of social imaginaries is an important one for its recognition of the political potency these technologies can have. Unfortunately, however, it is not accompanied in Haraway’s text by analysis of how any particular institutional databases have been deployed in doing this work of collecting and organizing information, so that it is to a certain extent difficult to see based on her discussion why it is or in what way that “lives are at stake” in the social construction and deployment of databases. In a related vein, Jacques Derrida delivers what he intends as certain provocative suggestions in his text Archive Fever about how the development and use of a technology like e-mail has radically altered the epistemological ground on which information is produced. He explains this shift in terms of the increasing reflexivity of knowledge making, which he characterizes by saying that processes of archiving, of storing information and making it readily available for retrieval, now bear more than ever before on the actual production of knowledge.^® But since such an epistemological sea change has evidently been under way within modernity for some while now”*®, it would certainly seem to be overstating the case for the importance of e-mail - or for that matter, any other technology or ensemble of technologies - to attribute to it so much of the responsibility for a

Haraway, 1995, p. xix. Derrida, pp. 16-18 See Giddens, 1991.

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civifizationa! transition of so vast a type. Moreover, Derrida’s discussion of arkhe, his term for the philosophical and political functions of the archive as a social technology, is unhelpful where it turns this concept into “a metaphor capacious enough to encompass the whole of modern information technology, its storage, retrieval and communication,” since as with Haraway this lack of specificity may obscure more than it illuminates the particular kinds of disciplinary effects resulting from or conjoined with the technologies of information storage and retrieval that both writers gesture towards in their discussions.^® Finally, Manovich’s treatment of databases as a feature of new media aesthetics is so bound up in a narrow formalism that it completely

leaves aside Dietz’s (implicit) recognition of the prominent role that cultural politics has occupied in the critical deployment of database logic in the work of a variety of significant new media art practitioners.^^ Though he lays out a reasonably compelling framework for discerning how certain features of the new media challenge established aesthetic genres (as with the impact of hypertext on narrative), Manovich gives no account of how these aesthetic developments fit into larger social and cultural trajectories, including those

having to do with cultural politics. As fellow media theorist Marsha Kinder

Steedman, p. 4. See Manovich.

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points out in her critique of yanovich’s work, the latter “establishes a formal rhetoric of new media without addressing cultural differences among players and practices.”^^ Such an approach to dealing with aesthetics in the new media seems poorly gauged to elucidating the full complexity and significance of the phenomena at hand. Even if one does not choose, as does Sandoval in her text on the mediatic "differental consciousness" of "U.S. Third World feminists," to locate minoritarian media work in a category that is fully discrete in an aesthetic or even ontological sense from the work of non-minoritarian practitioners, the analysis offered by Manovich still seems to do far too little to suggest ways in which the specific location(s) of minoritarian cultural work on the Internet cause it to be somewhat differently oriented than other, comparable work.^^ A small but important segment of the literature on the politics of information technologies has attempted to look carefully at how the disciplinarity of the database has worked in practice. Communications scholar Oscar Gandy has argued that the type of “social sorting” that occurs in the U.S. when certain kinds of consumer services are effectively denied to people living in certain areas based on databased information about their residence in these locations - a practice known as “redlining" - amounts to

Kinder, p. 120. See Sandoval.

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a form of surveillance working to hamper full participation in social life for those so targeted. Since redlining often has a de facto racial dimension, Gandy sees this particular application of database technology as doubly pernicious, in that it not only allows for social exclusion but also more particularly perpetuates and sediments a logic of racialization.^^ To a certain extent taking his cues from Gandy but setting his frame somewhat wider, the sociologist David Lyon has aimed to account for some of the most important ways in which databases may be used in projects of “digital discrimination,” projects via which certain types of people have been or are liable to be inequitably treated according to their location within databases assembling information related to social identity.^® He and Felix Stalder, for instance, have discussed how the movement to establish a national ID card in the U.S. after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks would establish a stable and universal identifier (UID) of each of the country’s residents, thereby making possible the integration of distributed databases for the purpose of compiling comprehensive behavioral profiles. Pointing to the U.S. Justice Department’s detention without trial of at least 1,200 people with “‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ origins” after the 9/11 events, the writers point out that “this kind of evidence should be sufficient to indicate that negative

See Gandy. An example of Lyon's productive affinity for and reliance upon Gandy’s work can be found in Lyon, 2002a.

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discrimination is likely to occur in situations where public fear is high (and stoked by media polarization of the debate), where high-tech companies are keen to market their solutions (surveillance technology firms saw their share prices multiply after 11 September 2001, at just the time when others, such as airlines were dropping) and where politicians are in the unprecedented terra incognita of large scale ‘terrorist’ threat.”^®The suggestion here is that the creation of a UID in the United States would be likely, especially in the current climate, to have differential and detrimental effects on those so identified according to criteria like ethnoraciai, national and religious identity. Lyon and Stalder thus signal that the problem with national ID programs should not only be understood in relation to concerns about privacy violations, as the issue is often framed, but instead with regard to matters like the stigmatization and surveillance of groups of people on the basis of ethnicity or race or other factors completely irrelevant to the

prevention of acts of terrorism. This emphasis on seeing database-supported social surveillance in terms of its discriminatory effects has indeed been one of Lyon’s most abiding and most important contribution to the scholarship on technoculture. To encapsulate his understanding of the general problem, Lyon writes

Lyon and Stalder, p.89

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Searchable databases rely on data abstracted from live embodied persons, data that Is subsequently used to represent them to some organization. Data thus extracted from people - at cash machines, via street video, in work-monitoring situations, through genetic or drug tests, in cell phone use - are used to create data doubles that are themselves constantly mutating and modifiable. But the data doubles, created as they are from coded categories, are not innocent or innocuous virtual fictions. As they circulate, they serve to open and close doors of opportunity and access. They affect eligibilities for credit or state benefits and they bestow the credentials or generate suspicion. They make a real difference. They have ethics, politics.^^

Though in this particular passage Lyon doesn’t specify what are the “coded categories” from which virtual fictions/data doubles are created, it is clear from both Gandy’s work and his own that among these categories is ethnoraciai identity. It is crucial for scholars like these to provide this emphasis on the politics of identity vis a vis the database, not only because most of the cultural critics focusing on the various uses of database technologies tend to spotlight concerns about privacy almost to the exclusion of any other significant issues, but also because those who address the racial and ethnic dimensions of cyber-identity have for the most part been preponderantly concerned with looking at identity play in contexts

Lyon 2002b, p. 24 263

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like the MUD.^® As noted elsewhere in this dissertation, such investigations of identity play are very important for understanding the kind of cultural work that has emerged with or in any case has been conditioned by the increasingly wide prevalence of Internet use. But for as relevant as such work undoubtedly is, it might well have profited studies like that of Nakamura, who concentrates on showing that the “supposedly ‘fluid’ selves [found in and made possible by cybercultures] are no less subject to cultural hegemonies, rules of conduct, and regulating cultural norms" than has been the case with the historically racialized subject, to not only take account of the kind of stereotyping (or “cybertyping” in her coinage) occurring in new

media spaces where participants are invited to form their own alternative , “virtual identities,” but also to pay heed to those information technological contexts where processes of identifying the subject are not nearly so voluntary, even on the surface.^® The ‘data doubling’ that Lyon addresses should not be seen as something entirely independent of what occurs in the confines of cybercultural identity experimentation, but should instead be seen as a key factor in the establishment and maintenance of the “cultural hegemonies” Nakamura invokes.

For an example of a text that put this kind of focus on the privacy issue, see Whitaker's The End of Privacy. ^ Nakamura, p. 4

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The sociologist Craig Calhoun suggestively formulates the problem with segregating cultural genres like cyber-play from the disciplinary work of data doubling in the following terms: (T)he kinds of recreational computer uses that Turkie [among others, including Nakamura] analyzes promote an experience of decentralized use, with participants in multi-user groups coming from all over, and of easily shifting identities and/or anonymity in role play. This is a far cry from the ways in which computer-mediated communication (including financial transactions) produces data on individuals' lives (both private and public), and potential surveillance based on that data. This is a far cry from the ways in which corporations use computers to organize global production and distribution systems, including those that make possible recreational computer communication. The corporate structure behind computers and the Internet is impressively centralized. Is the centralization of power political and economic - abetted by the experience of decentralization among everyday users of computer mediated communication?^

Here Calhoun draws our attention to something of a dialectical relation between cybercultural modes of identity experimentation and the organization of political and economic power structures at the global level. The ‘‘decentralization” so often seen to be a principal property of cybercultures, Calhoun contends, cannot be properly understood without

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reference to the “corporate structure” undergirding the operation of the Internet, for which it in some measure provides an alibi. There is no doubt a certain lack of specificity in this account, as well as a measure of reification in the reductive identification of a single “corporate structure” and an undifferentiated “experience of decentralization.” But Calhoun’s intervention is nevertheless an important one in this context in that he works to connect the political economy of database (and other information) technologies in their global deployment to the more immediately cultural practices of the Internet. This is a vital task for cultural workers seeking to provide critical perspectives on both the database as a key feature of contemporary information technology and on certain kinds of cultural formation taking shape on the Internet. To come back to Haraway’s comment about the high stakes in the deployment of database technologies, the potentially enormous impact of such technologies on “the informatics of possible worlds,” which is to say the grounds for conceptualizing social, cultural and political options for a future development and use of the information technologies that will substantially diverge from the status quo in this area, should not be overlooked when critics of cybercultures seek to bring into view what participants in these cultures have been doing and might be capable of doing.

® Calhoun, pp. 381-2

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For as much as the work discussed above has been valuable for its insistence on addressing the disciplinarity of the database technologies of the present, it has for the most part been the case that this work has remained disconnected from the equally helpful scholarship that has tried to demonstrate how in historical terms racial formations in the U.S. and Northern Europe have been filtered through and abetted by image archives

of the type that began to appear with the advent of photography in the 19*^ century. The pioneering study of the generation and utilization of 19*^ century image archives in line with projects of social discipline is, of course,

Allan Sekula’s 1986 essay “The Body and the Archive."^^ Expanding on the earlier work of Foucault, Sekula aims to show in this text that in France, England and the U.S. in the late 19^and early 20"^ centuries photography came to function as a technology of social subjectification and surveillance. Sekula in fact argues that the history of photography and visual technologies cannot properly be understood without recognizing their roots in such processes.^^ As such, he focuses on the concern in the 19^ century pseudoscience of phrenology and its more pernicious correlate, eugenics, for organizing the social body into a hierarchy of genetically-determined types via photographic ‘proofs’ and on the late 19*^ century prototechnocratic effort at rationalizing police procedures by applying

31

See Sekula.

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photography towards identifying and monitoring criminals, labor militants, or other agents of social ‘unrest.’ A careful consideration of the twin development of these two applications of photography and photo archiving, Sekula maintains, should play a major role in shaping cultural workers’ approach to the politics of visual culture and, though Sekula gives this latter point less attention, to the status of particular kinds of present day archives or databases in the ongoing coordination and administration of social disciplinarity. While in “The Body and the Archive” Sekula concentrates for the most part on the scientistic and police procedural use of the imaging or classificatory technologies of the day, Shawn Michelle Smith takes the work of accounting for the power of 19*^ and early 20th century photo archives even further by trying to demonstrate some of the ways in which the composition of these types of archives overlapped with the widespread application at the time of portrait photography as a means of white middle class self-identification. By pointing out conceptual convergences between the popular practice of middle class white parents’ monitoring their children’s development through photographs to be installed in family photograph albums and the eugenicist Francis Galton’s attempt to make photography the methodological key to his ‘proof of Anglo-Saxon ‘racial’

In this connection, see also Tagg.

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superiority (among other things), Smith works to bring more fully into view than does Sekula the dimension of raciaiization in these important archiving technologies of the recent past.^^ At the same time, Smith offers a fascinating discussion of W.E.B. Du Bois’s photographic project for the 1900 Paris Exposition, in which Du Bois submitted a brilliant rejoinder to the eugenicists by appropriating their photographic/archival “style” (concentration on the face, pairing of frontal and profile shots, presentation according to ‘type’) to record and display portraits of turn-of-the-century African-Americans to a vastly different effect than that achieved by someone like Galton.^ Rather than use the eugenicists’ imaging methods to certify claims about the hierarchical nature of race, Du Bois displayed the exemplary bearing of his photographic subjects as a way of disavowing 19*^ century racial science’s treatment of middle class whiteness in terms of a hazily conceived genetic superiority. The application of the very approach used by Galton to carry out his racializing project to do something so different with the photographs in Du Bois’s series also served to underline the performativity of the database, so that it became possible, at least in theory, for the audience to more carefully recognize the otherwise veiled, politically valenced choices going into the composition and organization of the eugenics database as with Galton. By doing as much Du Bois’s work

Smith, pp. 113-135

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acted as a precursor to the cultural work discussed in this dissertation, in that his 're-archival' project works as both an anti-racist intervention and as an interrogation of the logic underlying an important social technology of his day. At first glance, Piper’s work in Relocating the Remains might seem to be more concerned with finding novel means for presenting a retrospective view of his work than with taking up the kind of database critique pioneered by someone like Du Bois a century before. Reorganizing selected elements of his own body of work into a new configuration does not, after all, amount to the same thing as making subversive use of the organizing criteria of a particular (and particularly objectionable) archival project of the Galtonesque, white supremacist type. But to recognize that Piper’s engagement with the performativity of the database proceeds from a different angle than that offered by the earlier model does not mean that he is any less committed to using his work to bring attention to contemporary problems with the use of database technologies. Nor does it indicate that in Relocating the Remains he chooses to focus any less on race and raciaiization than did Du Bois. On the contrary, while his commentary on the contemporary status of raciaiization vis a vis database technology may be somewhat more oblique than was that of Du Bois contra the eugenicists,

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with Relocating the Remains Piper is ultimately just as bound up as was his predecessor with a reflection on how the logica! underpinnings and organizational protocols of certain kinds of databases and visual technologies can contribute to perpetuating race-based social inequality. Without ignoring or reducing their particularity, we may recognize that between the photo archival techniques of the eugenics movement and the blanket, database-enabled monitoring of Arabs who are citizens and residents of the U.S. in the name of 'homeland security,' there is a certain constancy manifesting as a raciaiization of the social order. A crucial aspect of Piper's work, as with DuBois's undertaking, is that it asks the audience to examine what it means for someone to locate his or her minoritarian subjectivity within and against the racializing and disciplinary effects of these kinds of historical and modern databases. Indeed, one of Piper’s paramount aims in this project is to put into question pervasive assumptions about who qualifies as a 'proper' subject of information technologies. In his case, this is not a question of setting forth corrective narratives about the historical role of members of the African diaspora in technological innovation and other constitutive elements of modernity.^® Invaluable task that this is. Piper appears to be more interested in doing something different

Eglash has made an interesting contribution at this level in essays like the piece included in The Cyborg Handbook, see also the introduction to Nelson et al.

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but equally momentous, which is to examine how their status as quintessential objects of state and scientific surveillance over the course of at least two and a half centuries^® can factor into African diasporic subjects’ production, in both the present and in the future, of alternative and transformative understandings of the social functionings of database technologies. Relocating the present day remains, the ‘remains’ (as both vestige and continuing, active phenomenon) of older forms of racialized technologies of social subjection and of African diasporic modes of

knowledge, agency and cultural expression (a la DuBois) always in tension with the operation of such technologies, is one of the tasks that Piper’s work appears to set for itself. What, the work demands, would a cyber­ subjectivity that takes into account this kind of under-acknowledged history of race-in-technology actually look like? Piper's work is carried out from the perspective of one who does not profess to be an expert or virtuoso in matters technological, but who instead possesses a substantial measure of what Andrew Ross has called the “new smartness.” Ross uses this term to do two things: 1. to disparage, with irony, the widely glorified "digerati,"®^ which he instead treats as in the main a "broadly entrenched technocracy, which commands a vast resource base

See Parent!. For an example of the glorification of the "cyber-elite," see Brockman.

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of human and electronic facilities, and which enjoys the support of a pervasive ideology of problem-solving expertise and rule-driven competence": and 2. to draw attention to the more politically progressive alternatives to this model of technological engagement that he sees as having emerged in opposition to it over the course of the last two or three decades.^® Among these latter Ross includes the category of "radical technologist," something that he identifies primarily with the work of hackers as it challenges the political and cultural command of the Gatesian

technocracy. Another way of thinking about this category, however, would be to take it to encompass the technocultural interventions of someone like Piper. Piper’s work is less about deploying, in the interest of being vaguely 'oppositional', some kind of differently cast mastery of information technologies than that which prevails among the technocracy than it is about calling attention to the historical, ethical and conceptual grounds upon which any and all such mastery is conceived. From a critical minoritarian perspective. Piper asks how, in what ways, has one greatly significant element of information technology, archiving and database technology, been applied in the course of its development, and with what consequences for those who were made, when these applications worked in the service of raciaiization, its objects and targets? The exercise of this kind of "new

^ Ross, p. 334

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smartness" is thus about allowing those who encounter Piper's piece to re­ visit some of their assumptions about the social and cultural value of technological mastery in relation to some of the more salient historical and ongoing problems with its application. As such, Relocating the Remains offers not only a notable critique of the social functioning of information technologies and technologies, but also a constructive opening to another type of cyber-subjectivity that cultural workers of the future might seek to occupy in order to advance minoritarian political demands and democratize

cybercultures. In a sense, Piper’s performance of a process in which he serves as both creator and object of a database dealing with modes of raciaiization offers a kind of critical commentary on what Lyon calls data doubling, with Piper injecting himself into the archive - in the (partial) representation of his face in the "observation" section of the web site, specifically, but also more generally by working as the archivist of his own work - in order to dramatize a political and ethical reclaiming of the archive’s work from a particular, invested vantage as minoritarian cultural worker. The “new smartness” that he brings to this work involves not only manipulating the available technology, but also providing his cybercultural audience with an opportunity to reflect on how such technology may function in significantly divergent ways according to the cultural positioning of those who employ it or are

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targeted for ‘data discrimination’ through its effects. It matters that he does as much precisely because, for one thing, as has been discussed throughout this dissertation, participants in and observers of the discourses and practices of technoculture have in some cases been al! too eager to jettison consideration of issues of location, including racial location, by asserting or at least assenting to the idea that the anonymity effects of cyberspace effectively obviate the need to carefully acknowledge pre-existent cultural identity as a factor in the production of the types of knowledge relevant to cybercultures. The suggestion in Piper’s work that his own “relocating” of his work onto the internet is inextricably related to the work of database technologies in conditioning racial identities serves as one indication that this view of cybercultures is blinkered, if not indeed completely unfounded. That the work of “relocating the remains” of earlier moments in the genealogy of raciaiization in the framework of information technologies involves Piper’s representation of racially subjected bodies points to something of an insistence in this work that projects intended to mobilize digital technologies towards socially progressive ends should not simply leave aside a concern for how race is embodied and lived outside the precincts of cyberspace. This point will perhaps seem obvious to some of those reading this dissertation, but it merits emphasizing here precisely because a commentator on cybercultures as prominent as Mark Poster has

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gone as far as to assert that the emergence of the Internet and the cultures attached to it has somehow brought about the effective eclipse of “historical ethnicity” as a factor that might otherwise be seen to contribute, at least in part, to the varieties of self-identification and social intercourse in cyberspace that Poster parades before his readers under the vastly generalizing rubric of ‘postmodernism’. After an extended argument about the sudden primacy of what he calls “virtual ethnicity,” where in his fuzzy albeit familiarly hyperbolic cyber-theoretical reckoning identity becomes “a temporary, fluid link to a process of creation, an underdetermined [emphasis in original] entity whose recognition is never a mis(s) because it never congeals into permanence” (and so on), this well-regarded scholar of the new media delivers a wholly unaccountable bottom line: “Linked to continuously shifting global processes of textual, graphic, and aural formations, individuals in cyberspace cannot attach to objects in the fixed shapes of historic ethnicity.”^®On the Internet, in other words, the existence of ethnoracial identity is no longer of any discernible consequence because some other form of specifically technological ethnicity/identity (or non­ identity?) has supplanted it. What makes this pronouncement especially troubling, not to mention bizarre, is that Poster makes it after having only faintly touched on any actual examples of ethnic identity as they have

Poster, 2001, p. 170

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appeared either online or elsewhere - there is a brief section of the argument dealing with “Jews In (cyber)space” - while leaving racial identity in any recognizable form entirely out of consideration. His high theoretical explorations completely sidestep all of the thorny issues surrounding the status of race and nation in this historical conjuncture by simply and summarily announcing their irrelevance to the underdetermined entities fluidly avoiding congealing throughout cyberspace. The reader of Poster’s recent work is thus left with the highly dubious suggestion that a responsible and clear-sighted treatment of contemporary social and cultural identity vis a vis the Internet can proceed as if the very existence of this technology and the cultures connected to it were enough to foreclose the need to pursue further investigation of the “fixed shapes of historical ethnicity” as a feature pertinent in some shape or form to the multitudinous variants of identity as they are now expressed online. Ultimately, Poster appears to believe that raciaiization ceases to be a problem in cybercultures to the degree that such cultures are able to ‘route around’ it, to use the cybercultural parlance, by discovering other nonethnoracial sites of identification on which to center their work. The notion that what “virtual ethnicity” really means in this context is, mutatis mutandis, unmarked whiteness is something that doesn’t occur to Poster to consider, despite the existence of recent ethnographic work that appears to

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demonstrate that concerns about the roie of whiteness in certain kinds of cybercultures, whether pronounced as such or more tacit, continue to be a significant component of the self-understanding and preferred modes of socializing favored by the participants in these cultures. Kendall, for example, finds in research conducted in a ‘cyber-pub’ that for visitors to this not atypical cybercultural environment (t)he ultimate test of whether race matters online is the ability of black people to pass unnoticed as black. This emphasizes the presumed desirability of hiding blackness and the assumption that people online are white. While the latter assumption is not unreasonable, given the current demographics of online participants, it demonstrates the extent to which anonymity cannot be classified as an absence of identity characteristics. When black participants must state that they are black in order to be identified as such, anonymity carries with it a presumptive identity of whiteness.'*®

Kendall’s findings thus suggest that any absence of immediate discernibility of racial identities and racial dynamics as constituent features of cybercultures should be a starting point for further inquiry rather than an unambiguous indication that race is not germane within such sites. With this in mind. Poster’s nebulously conceived “virtual ethnicity” would seem to be

'*® Kendall, p. 210

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something that at very least needs to be indexed against the kinds of racial identities currently being imported into cyberspace. Instead of imagining, a la the old Alec Guinness/Alexander MacKendrick cinematic marvel, “The Man in the White Suit,’’ that “virtual ethnicity” can be fashioned out of a wholly new, ever unstainable fabric, it makes a great deal more sense to take account of the vested interests that many of those marked (or unmarked) racially as white will inevitably have in maintaining the privileges that accrue to them under the racial status quo, even as they enter into the putatively anonymity-based and race-neutral terrain of cyberculture. Indeed, the findings in the aforementioned ethnographic work would seem to admit the strong possibility that what Poster sees as some kind of wholly novel cultural phenomenon, i.e., virtual ethnicity, amounts in actual fact to a reconstitution of default whiteness (among other things), albeit in a conveniently refashioned guise in the context of a generalized anonymity. In this respect. Piper’s work might be seen as a vehicle for bringing together the critical impulses that have driven the scholarship about the “body and the archive” with a concern to emphatically disavow the tendency of the present to treat cybercultural subjectivity as if it can magically transcend both the body as such and the role of race and raciaiization in giving meaning to specific bodies in various kinds of social, cultural and epistemological contexts. Piper’s embodied minoritarian subjectivity is one

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that is seen, via the representation of his own body alongside the various other images of raciaiized bodies in the piece, to be both inexorably attached to earlier and ongoing uses of the database to construct and discipline the racialized body and at the same time to be responsive to the need to find an alternative to the conception of cybercultural subjectivity, al! too widely favored, that would remove from view race as a crucial factor in

the way that cyber-subjects both produce themselves and are themselves produced. It is as if Piper wishes to bring before Poster and others who share the letter’s perspective the evidence of his negotiation of information technology at the level of a race-informed, yet-embodied historical perspective. The effect of the presentation of this evidence, necessary only because the discourse of cyberculture has been dominated by those who are not inclined to look squarely at the ‘actually existing' status of race vis a vis information technologies, is to make it much harder, at least theoretically, to sustain the claims of someone like Poster for the transmutation of historical race and ethnicity into something wholly ‘virtual.’ Invoking the archives of racializing eugenics and the contemporary databases connected to state surveillance of racialized targets, Piper’s work demands consideration as a critical lens on both the lack of attention given in much of the cultural work in/on cyberspace to the disciplinary effects of ‘data doubling’ and on the disavowal of the complexities of embodied

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subjectivity and the vicissitudes of ethnoracial identity in the technocultures of the present.

Afrofuturism

Piper’s aesthetic is sometimes associated with the diffuse yet still quite significant tendency in African diasporic expressive culture known as Afrofuturism, though the characterization of his work in these terms has not so far produced any sustained analytical considerations of Piper-asAfrofuturist. The topic of increased critical attention in recent years, Afrofuturism was defined in 1993 by cybercultural commentator Mark Dery as “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture...and more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.”^^ Dery’s initial conceptualization of this sub-field of cultural production along with, among others, Tricia Rose, Greg Tate, and Samuel Delaney, has proved very useful in moving others to investigate its various features. Since then scholars seeking to contribute to the developing awareness

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about Afrofuturist cultural production have moved from the early focus on readily recognizable technological innovators like hip hop or techno DJs and creators of the alternative worlds of science fiction like Delaney to encompass a still richer and more diverse range of sites for investigation, a few of which are discussed below. Among the key recognitions made possible via this expanded spectrum of work is that there is one thing about Dery’s definition that urgently needs clarifying, both in a general sense and in particular where Piper’s work is concerned: while a number of the figures commonly identified as important to Afrofuturism are American (ranging from writers like Delaney and Octavia Butler to musicians like George Clinton and Sun Ra), there is simply no good reason to delimit the field to

encompass only those whose work “treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concems." The fact that Dery does as much highlights the need for alt American cultural workers, including those who aim to critique some of the more pernicious assumptions attaching to the “discourses of cyberculture,”^^ to avoid uncritically extrapolating from American (and African-American) experiences of information technology when attempting to account for significant tendencies within technocultures. In the space of this dissertation, after all, we have already seen that not only

Dery, p. 180 This phrase Is (part of) the title of the book in which the Afrofuturism essay appears.

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Piper but also the members of Mongrel are neither American nor primariiy occupied with addressing African-American concerns. At the same time, this isn’t to say that there is or can be no overlap among the aims and methods of differently located Afrodiasporic cybercultural workers, or that these aims and methods do not intersect at any ieve! with those of other minoritarian cybercultural workers, or finally with those of white cultural workers like myself oriented towards spotlighting the intersection of race

and technology in their work."*^ On the contrary, this dissertation aims to identify or enable others to identify where some such points of intersection are occurring. One of the most important aspects of Afrofuturist cultural production for our purposes is that this work presents its concern with speculative futurism as integrally related to the contemporary articulation of minoritarian aesthetics and political perspectives. Gilroy addresses this aspect of Afrofuturism when he acknowledges its importance for responding to an historical moment in which “corrective or compensatory inclusion in modernity should no longer supply the dominant theme” for those now wishing to advance minoritarian cultural initiatives. Rather than looking

At the same time It needs to be acknowledged that white cultural critics approaching these issues are bound to have different perspectives related to their racial location, and that these perspectives are liable at times to fail to properly register the understandings of raciaiization that some minoritarian cultural workers

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towards demonstrating their worthiness for incorporation in the critical genealogies and ongoing trajectories of Western art, Gilroy suggests, Afrofuturist artists have been concerned to locate themselves within a “radical alterity” allowing for “another mode of recognition in the most alien identity they can imagine.”^ In a frequently fascinating discussion of the various ways that ‘extraterrestriality’ has functioned as an (un)grounding metaphor for this kind of cultural work, whether as performed by someone like George Clinton or manifested within popular culture by something like Dr. Martin Luther King’s admiration for the character of Lieutenant Uhura on “Star Trek,” Gilroy makes a case for seeing Afrofuturism as pointing towards a further development of “vemacular futurology” as a fundamental aspect of black Atlantic expressive cultures."^® At present, the object of this undertaking of futurology in terms of aesthetics would appear to be, among other things, to combine innovative mappings of the emerging technological landscape with a challenge to and displacement of the straitening parameters of multiculturalist inclusion, some of which were discussed in Chapter 2 with regard to Latino cultures, as the paradigm for the production and critical understanding of the work of Afrodiasporic art.

have been able to develop in response to their involuntary insertion within racialized social and cultural frameworks. Gilroy, 2000, p.348 ibid., p.347

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Alongside its substantia! consequence for the conceptual dimensions and formal concerns of current Afrodiasporic expressive modes, Afrofuturism is of moment, Gilroy makes clear, for the ways that it can contribute to a reconsideration, in a more general sense, of the status of black cultural identity in this historical moment. Gilroy formulates this notion by speaking of a compound diaspora identity where time, historicity, and historicality have been doubly politicized: first by resistance to white supremacy and then by the uncomfortable acceptance that [members of the African diaspora] are no longer what [they] once were and cannot rewind the tapes of [their] complex cultural life to a single knowable point of origin...|T]his difficult alternative yields to a nonreversible diaspora that can be understood as web, multiplicity and communicative network."*®

Unraveling the Implications of this state of affairs, Gilroy determines that the emergence of this kind of less temporally rooted, ‘networked’ black diasporic identity entails the need to find new grounds for political connection both within black cultures and outwards towards other minoritarian cultural formations. Making connections within this diasporic “multiplicity” is seen as futurist both in the more obvious sense that the minoritarian cultural politics of the future will take shape according to how

‘*®ibid.. p. 341

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coalitions are constructed within and across minoritarian collective bodies of the present, and in the sense that forming such connections will inevitably invite a heightened degree of seif-reflection about what Gilroy, meaning to describe a by-default need in African diasporic cultures to reckon with concerns about cohesion and collective identity in a future that is in some ways likely to be so radically different than what has come before, calls the ‘non-reversibility’ of diaspora and diasporic identity. By virtue of an historical displacement, then, diasporic cultures bring with them something of an

imperative to imagine and occupy a certain futurity. The task of recognizing what is productively futurist in Afrodiasporic cultures is nonetheless made more difficult by the existence of other, less forward-looking ways of conceiving the significance of this moment in African diasporic cultural history. These include, Gilroy demonstrates, the tendency on the part of some to celebrate the movement within the marketing industries of the U.S. and Western Europe to recuperate the “athletic perfection of the black male body” as a sign of postmodern dynamism and, ultimately, corporate globalization conceived as benign agent of multiculturalism; and a corresponding proclivity towards the conspiracy theories of “New Age fundamentalism” that represent a lure in some quadrants of Afrodiasporic culture (Gilroy refers specifically to the Nation of Islam). Both of these phenomena, Gilroy shows, offer meretricious

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routes towards transcending histories of raciaiization; on the one hand, via the image worlds of corporate multiculturalism, within which the historically

novel phenomenon of marketers’ selective and still quite loaded appropriation of signs of black culture to augment the value of particular product brands is read as proof of a definitive abatement of white racial hegemony: and otherwise, by way of the embrace of alternative belief systems the theologies of which depend for their purchase on mystifying race and racial identities as divinely ordained essences rather than as

socially produced entities. Against and in spite of these ways of diluting and distorting the potential of vemacular futurology to take black cultural identity in other, more politically promising directions, Afrofuturism constitutes an important part of a very different project of cultural critique, one that is “lived and enjoyed as both counterculture and counterpower, formulated at the junction point - the crossroads - of diaspora dwelling and diaspora estrangement.’”^^ Gilroy thus sees Afrofuturism as offering some resistance to what are, for all their semblance of currency, essentially retrograde or in any case tainted trajectories in cultural development, while at the same time being helpful for generating thinking about and affective engagement with some of the most complicated questions of historical and cultural identity facing Afrodiasporic subjects.

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Gilroy’s remarks about Afrofuturism as a vehicle for culturai politics are, as is customarily the case with his commentaries, surpassingly helpful for cultural critics seeking to decide on what meanings to assign to the type of aesthetic production falling into this category. His emphasis on seeing Afrofuturism in relation to contemporary discussions about the hybridization of identity seems well-placed to capture a sense of how Afrofuturist work has in certain ways departed from some of the most prominent concerns

(e.g., for "corrective or compensatory inclusion in modernity") of earlier moments in black cultural history, while nevertheless retaining, at least implicitly, the critique of white supremacism it has inherited from earlier iterations of African diasporic cultural work. Yet for all its analytical acuity, Gilroy’s account of Afrofuturist cultural work has the drawback of largely ignoring the role of digital technology as both medium for the production of some of this work and as target of its critical energies. Despite the fact that he relies on metaphors like web and communicative network to explain the status of transnational culture in the African diaspora, Gilroy pays scant attention to the ways that the Internet, for example, has functioned or may in the future come to function as an element of the futurism that he instead prefers to identify primarily with a science fiction-derived trope like extraterrestriality. While not at ail denying either the singularity or resonance of the ‘space alien’ aesthetic within Afrofuturism, it is still possible to ask

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whether talking about this particular aspect of vernacular futurology within the work of black artists of the last few decades is enough to fully encompass the range of interventions that have been made or might be made in this vein. Alongside of such a query, we might also question whether it is possible to do justice to the current diffusion of culture(s) within the Black Atlantic if the Internet and cybercultures remain unexamined. The work of certain other scholars who have looked at various kinds of diaspora in the contemporary world has Indeed suggested otherwise, with these analysts taking the view that the emergence and spread of the Internet has had an enormously important bearing on how diasporic networks have so far been constituted and continue to be reconstituted.'*®

Meanwhile, where the critical writing about Afrofuturist cultural work is concerned, there have been other compelling additions to the literature that stand alongside Gilroy’s as highly useful and thought provoking. Alexander Weheliye’s and Thomas Foster’s studies of the ‘machinic’ aesthetics of certain genres of African-American popular music (principally contemporary R&B and hip hop), and the figuration of the African-American cyborg characters in the Deathlok comic book series, respectively, have made for an effective contribution to a more considered and nuanced

See Landzeiius; Slater and Miller.

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understanding of the themes and methods of this kind of cultural work.'^® Weheliye’s examination of the ‘technologization’ of the voice in recent black popular music through the use of the vocoder and the ‘cell phone effect’ in vocal performance makes the important point that the vernacular futurology Gilroy speaks about may just as readily manifest via an engagement with technologies already available and in daily use as it may in the “radical alterity” of science fiction or in the more self-consciously ‘post-humanist’ designs that an otherwise thoughtful writer like Eshun inaccurately identifies as the sine qua non of the futurist impulse in African diasporic aesthetic productionFoster, meanwhile, shows that in the Deathlok comics writers Gregory Wright and Dwayne McDuffie employ the frame of reference made familiar through the cyberpunk novels of people like William Gibson or Neil Stephenson to present an allegory about African-American identity that departs from the celebratory tone sometimes surrounding narratives of cyborg disembodiment (though this is not really the case, for the most part, in the work of Gibson and Stephenson themselves). The characters of the comic, Foster explains, eschew an unqualified embrace of posthumanism in favor of a complex engagement with both the promise of transcending the racialized past and the need to find a way of treating ‘prosthetic identity’ as meaningfully related to longstanding, ‘pre-virtual’ efforts within the African

49

See Weheliye; Foster.

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diaspora to disrupt and augment the category of the ‘human’ as it has been differentiaily composed and applied in histories of raciaiization. Both Weheliye and Foster thus offer rich insights into how technocultural identities are imagined from within Afrodiasporic perspectives that are informed jointly by the practical burdens of raciaiization and the desire to culturally innovate around and within the still emerging practices and discourses attached to information technologies. Among the other important matters that they address, then, a crucial feature that these two scholars’

works share is that they demonstrate that the ‘Mother Ship’ of extraterrestriality, as important as it has been for Afrofuturist imaginaries, is hardly the only metaphorical vehicle that the agents of vernacular futurology have taken up. Afrofuturism is also sometimes about pointedly making use of and responding to the more familiar technologies of the present with the aim of researching and producing the ethical grounds for inhabiting the future. For as relevant to this study as these writers’ texts undoubtedly are, however, they also show that Gilroy has not been alone in devoting relatively little attention to another of today’s (more and more) familiar technologies: the Internet. This omission in some of the most important scholarship addressing Afrofuturist cultural production is important not only

This point about Eshun’s work is drawn from Weheliye's essay.

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because, as suggested above, the Internet appears to be having an impact on the composition and dynamics of diasporic networks (or some of them, at least), but also because increasingly widespread Internet use has arguably represented a uniquely important development for the “informatics of possible worlds,” to once again invoke Haraway’s potent formulation for a particular strand of (wary) utopianism that she espouses in all of her work. One does not. after ail, have to look very far to find examples in the literature on cybercultures of texts that choose to frame these cultures as likely to be transformative of the social body in only the most salutary ways (by contrast with Haraway's circumspection). This connection of the cultures of the Internet to utopian reckonings with the future will be readily familiar to anyone who spent any time online in the 1990s or read any of the popular literature on the Internet produced during this period (e.g., Negroponte).®^ Perhaps not surprisingly, this more celebratory treatment of the Internet has been consistently, if not as prominently, challenged by skeptics with a view to disabusing a general audience readership as to the alleged merits of the

See Negroponte; for the ongoing purchase this kind of Internet boosterism we could perhaps take as Exhibit A the piece that journalist Kevin Kelly wrote for the Wall St. Joumal in January, 2002. Therein Kelly calls the Intemet "a miracle and a gift," justifying his encomium by pointing out in remarkably oversimplified fashion that "the Web runs on love, not greed." It is difficulty to see how so thoroughly flattening the complexity of the Internet as an object of analysis can be helpful to those trying to understand its import.

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cultural developments attached to cyberspace.®^ Those whoVe read the scholarly work on the Internet, meanwhile, will know that the utopian and dystopian tendencies just sketched out have been reproduced there in still more elaborate forms, but that most academic analysts are at pains to plant themselves somewhere in between the largely unqualified boosterism of the Pierre Levy type®® and the jeremiads laid out by writers like Robins and Webster, and Kroker and Weinstein.®^ Undoubtedly, it is in many ways

judicious for scholars to work somewhere between these extremes, as it allows them to give close attention to what is actually occurring in the cultural work of cyberspace rather than giving undue weight to what is thought, sometimes with very little empirical basis, to be possible.®® Slater and Miller’s exemplary work on the cybercultures of Trinidad and the Trinidadian diaspora amply demonstrates the benefits of assuming such a pragmatic research orientation vis a vis the Internet.®® But having acknowledged as much, it is also important to ask how the utopian impulses evident in the work of the Afrofuturists, given the value they have for opening up areas of innovation in African diasporic expressive

See Stoll. See Levy. ^ See Robins and Webster; Kroker and Weinstein, ®®In this connection, see Nash's critique of Castells. Among the other features that make Slater and Miller's work a vital contribution to the literature on cyberspace is their brief but incisively critical reading of the way

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cultures or allowing for inquiry into contemporary black cultural identity, are to be understood in a context where sustained inquiry has convincingly demonstrated the factitiousness of the utopian claims earlier attached to cyberspace. Should the Afrofuturist variety of utopia then be discounted as inadequately measured to responding to the cultures of the actually existing Internet? If the largely uncritical euphoria about the social and cultural implications of the Internet widely expressed in the 1990s (along with the corresponding refusal of this ill-founded intoxication on the part of IT refuseniks) is regarded by the majority of scholars of communications and popular culture as a perspective that is better left behind, would it not also make sense to treat Afrofuturist interventions on the Internet like Piper’s as misguided to the degree that they likewise seek to tap into some of the utopian resonances of cyberspace? Or to approach this question from a slightly different direction: if it seems important to avoid following in the path of the technological determinist Internet utopianism of the 1990s, is there any other form of utopian imagining that might still be seen as of particular relevance for (re)conceiving the cultural work of the Internet? Does the Afrofuturism of someone like Piper in any way offer a viable alternative to the conceptual bankruptcy of earlier models of envisioning cyber-utopia?

that the concept of "virtuality" has so far been seen as universally applicable, rather than useful only in specific cases, to understanding what happens online.

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Before these questions are addressed, perhaps it is necessary to back up and clarify in what sense Piper’s work in Relocating the Remains should be seen as utopian in nature. After all, this is an artist who earlier produced a work called Caught Like a Nigger in Cyberspace, a title that for whatever irony it may contain is scarcely expressive of a hopeful disposition towards the effect of doing cultural work on the Internet. And the artist himself has in some of his public pronouncements substantially disavowed Internet utopianism, while at the same time downplaying whatever elements of his own work might be construed as utopian.®^ All of that being true, there is nonetheless in Piper’s work in Relocating the Remains a movement beyond redress of a more identarian and readily discemible sort - as in, a black man heroically labors to review and reclaim his heritage - into something still more powerful. The project deals with not only how such a reclaiming might be carried out, but over and above this important initial concern, how our notions of both ethnoracial identity and information technological subjectivity might be in large measure reformulated in accord with minoritarian critiques of modernity. The desire and capacity, broadly but suggestively attributed to hackers as a whole by Andrew Ross, for "reskilling, and therefore rewriting the cultural programs and reprogramming

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the socia! values that make room for new technologies” is one that is line with Piper’s apparent ethos and aims, and is something that I would argue qualifies the work as properly utopian, In that It envisions the possibility for

those now operating outside the hegemonic center of technoculture to have a profoundly transformative effect on the very social and Ideological groundwork of technological development.®® A more pragmatic orientation to doing cultural work In this context might stop at calling for greater access to information technologies on the part the socially marginalized, but to the degree that a project has utopian features, as does Relocating the Remains, it will point beyond issues of access to the need to recast the social, cultural and ideological bases for understanding what information technologies are and what they do. No matter how much ill-conceived utopianism has so far been a problem for Internet cultural work and research, this kind of utopian concern to "rewrite cultural programs and reprogram social values" as these intersect with information technologies is one that must still be regarded as more than ever relevant. Having now considered as much, here we should look more carefully at how in the particular context of Relocating the Remains Piper’s critical efforts aim toward utopian horizons.

See Mercer, Piper and Stewart.

“ See Ross 1990. 296

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Drawing upon and criticaily re-framing archives and databases having a role in the work of racialization in the context of an Internet-based multimedia piece gives Piper a way of raising the question of whether the still emerging cultures of information technology might be made, via an historically informed and politically attuned engagement with some of their underlying assumptions and deformations, to play a significant part in efforts at finding new, viably “relocated” entry points into the performance of ethnoracial identities. In Piper's work, the race-informed database (or quasi­ database) becomes not an instrument of racialized discipfinarity, but instead a vehicle for demonstrating the need to conceive racial and technocultural

identities in ways substantially different from those offered by the historical precedents. Cyberspace, for Piper, offers a venue within which to consider how contemporary performances of these identities might to some extent be re-calibrated so as to begin to include an ethically grounded awareness of the social technologies (from early eugenics forward to "digital discrimination") upon which they have so far depended for their realization. The artist does not soft-pedal the complications involved in carrying out this kind of critical engagement, recognizing as he does in this work (and others) that much if not all of the historical thrust in the development and deployment of information technologies has in fact pushed against the realization of racial justice by extending the state’s power to identify,

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monitor, and discipline racialized subjects. And he very definitely does not suggest that racial injustice is something that can be transcended via the cybercultural adoption of a kind of putatively de-racialized identity. It is, indeed, readily evident that Piper's work depends on an acute recognition of the material and symbolic violence against racialized subjects that continues to be carried out via the application of certain information technologies.

Nonetheless. Piper’s project clearly does involve working productively with not only the Instruments of information technology as such but also, as in Afrofuturist work more generally, a pointed aim to culturally and 'futurologically' innovate around the limits and potentials of ethnoracial identity as it is currently constituted via a strategic manipulation of certain of the functional and symbolic properties of technoculture and technocultural artifacts. It is cultural work that takes seriously the notion that such important constituents of hyper-modemity can be efficaciously turned towards a critique of those enterprises of modernity that have involved the systematic subordination of the global North’s racialized others. In the process, or such is the implication, the cultural work of information technologies and the types of subjectivity that are created in conjunction with this work can be estranged from their association, not typically avowed as such, with whiteness as cultural norm and ground for racial domination.

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Again, this is not about technological determinism, whereby the existence of the Internet would itself somehow be enough to dislodge whiteness as a site of race-derived privilege and power; it is instead about a hopeful cultural initiative to reclaim the promise of information technologies as contributing agents to social change in a frame of reference that allows for meaningful recognition of minoritarian demands for cultural and political

justice - including the demand that surveillance and database technologies not be applied, even as something collateral to their ‘actual’ purposes, as instruments of racial discipline. It is in this respect that Relocating the Remains can properly be called Afrofuturist and knowingly utopian. It is for this reason, likewise, that the work should be seen as an important addition to the minoritarian cultural work challenging the presumptive whiteness of the Internet.

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Conclusion - Going Forward

The turn in the preceding chapter towards discussing the politics of database technology as this has been applied to the racialization of the U.S. and U.K. social order in scientific research agendas and state security protocols (as well as credit markets) is one that seems especially urgent in the present day climate of generalized surveillance. In an era where the Patriot Act threatens to push forcefully against the bulwark of U.S. civil liberties and both Americans and Britons faces ever increasing use of security cameras to monitor public space, it is more than ever important for those on the political left to develop a response to those forms of social surveillance that make dissent into an increasingly precarious business. As Christian Parenti has written, “Even before the terrorists attacks of 9/11 the routine surveillance of everyday life was expanding,” while since that event “the worst elements of the political class ... seek to steer fear and anger towards the destruction of traditional American liberties.”^ In response to this state of affairs, specific strategies need to be constructed to confront

'Qtd in Gilmore 300

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both the broader consequences of the prevalence of surveillance for the political freedoms of the population as a whole and the more particular upshot of this for racialized minorities, who as the previous chapter tries to show are liable to suffer differentially greater effects from this application of the technologies of surveillance. In a related vein, left cultural workers need to be attuned to

opportunities for making use of the Internet and other media resources to contest the state control and suppression of information about matters of vital public interest. The recent incident in which an American obtained photos of the coffins of killed American soldiers being returned to the U.S. from the war in Iraq and published them on the Web offers an instance of this kind of contestation, in this case against the Pentagon’s questionable prerogative to suppress such information on behalf of its political masters. Antonio Mutadas’s work on re-publishing censored material from around the world on the Web in a dedicated database, a project to which 1referred in passing in the introduction and in the last chapter, represents one model for expanding such a media activist impulse into a sustainable apparatus for holding states accountable on the world stage for their undemocratic policies, including those having to do with access to information. Obviously, certain NGOs have been doing such work for some time now, but the massive expansion of the Internet’s reach in the last five to ten years sets

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up the possibility that media activists with relatively low levels of funding and technological knowledge can carry forward this work in ways that will have a real bearing on both local and global politics. In support of such activist efforts to resist state policies designed to both extend and refine the operation of surveillance technologies and to maintain an anti-democratic constraint on access to crucial political information properly belonging In the public record, 1would argue that it is also critical for left cultural workers, including especially the minoritarians among them, to promote a greater awareness of how in a broader, more general sense the cultures of information technology have supported and continue to support an environment of social inequality, including racial

inequality. The work addressed in this dissertation aims precisely in this direction. Though for the most they don’t intervene directly into any specific political struggles against racial injustice, these works aim to bring heightened attention to some of the evolving contexts, in the realm of information technology cultures, where the problem of white dominance of the U.S. and U.K. social order continues to represent an enormous problem for those who occupy other racial categories and identities. Whether it be in search engines or ‘creative industry’ trade shows, public opinion surveys or MUDs, eBay’s auction network or the conventional logic of museum display, Patriot Act-era ethnoracially-ordered surveiliance or conceptualizations of

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disembodied “virtual ethnicity,” the artists whose work I’ve discussed in this dissertation attempt to locate, analyze and critique processes that serve to uphold race-based social inequality according disproportionate power and privilege to whites and onerous burdens to others. By doing so, they help to open up consideration of issues related to the information politics of technocultures that have so far not been given their due in either the popular or scholarly response to such cultural formations. As such, they speak to some of the most vital issues of knowledge/power underlying the more immediately political struggles in these times. In the circumstances outlined above, it is perhaps difficult to see why a thread of the discussion in the dissertation has been devoted to addressing the utopian dimension of the minoritarian cultural work that responds to the most prominent discourses and practices seen in technocultures. Speaking of utopian conceptualizations of information technology cultures from minoritarian perspectives perhaps seems misplaced and misguided in a moment where, as noted above, social surveillance of racialized subjects has appeared to acquire a renewed ‘legitimacy’ in the context of the open-ended ‘War on Terrorism’. The contention I have wished to put forward is not that Mongrel, Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes, Obadike and Piper seek to ignore such concerns, but

instead that they insist on conceiving complex ‘spaces of hope’ wherein

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new kinds of cultural work, enabling novel forms of critical engagement with the effects of racialization, might be engendered, elaborated and maintained. One might even say that such work strives to use the utopian promise of cyberspace strategically and, as it were, against itself. If social surveillance is the order of the day, the authors of this work seem to say, and if racialized subjects have long been the quintessential targets of this kind of discipline, then perhaps now more than ever is a moment when those who reject the logic of generalized surveillance and privacy invasion, including of course many of the denizens of cybercultures, can be made to recognize their stake in likewise refusing the logic of information technology abetted racialization. Whether or not such an outcome is in fact likely where certain kinds of cyberculture are concerned - and present indications are decidedly not favorable in that regard - the work of the artists discussed in this dissertation vitally contributes to establishing a more ethically viable foundation upon which the cybercultural participants of the future might justly aim to ground their activities.

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